Topic modeling could stand in as a synecdoche of digital humanities. It is distant reading in the most pure sense: focused on corpora and not individual texts, treating the works themselves as unceremonious “buckets of words,” and providing seductive but obscure results in the forms of easily interpreted (and manipulated) “topics.” In its most commonly […]
Abstract We report here trends in the usage of “mood” words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive […]
Online publications that aggregate content from a wide variety of sources have become increasingly valuable to readers and publishers. The academy, however, is still unsure how to efficiently identify, collect, survey, evaluate, and redistribute the valuable scholarly writing published both formally and informally on the open web. Fortunately, some scholarly communities are developing methods to […]
An Intern Considers the Digital Preservation Challenge, Part 1 I came to NDIIPP expecting to hear that institutions and the public weren’t prioritizing digital preservation, and that the next wave of librarians would need to shout from the rooftops to raise awareness that digital objects are facing mass obsolescence. I expected a clear, clean outline […]
In February, I visited Matthew Kirschenbaum’s #ENGL668K Introduction to Digital Humanities course at the University of Maryland, and I brought to class an activity that I had been mulling over in my own mind for a long time, called the Topic Modeling Game. The game is designed to teach the basic principles of topic modeling with LDA […]
Once upon a time in a land far far away there was a beautiful princess named Snow Byte. Snow Byte was a wonderful child who loved and was beloved by all who knew her, except for one. Her father, the king, had married a new wife and, as is often the case in fairy tales, […]
Henry Oldenburg created the first scientific journal in 1665 with a simple goal: apply an emerging communication technology — the printing press — to improve the dissemination of scholarly knowledge. The journal was a vast improvement over the letter-writing system that it eventually replaced. But it had a cost: no longer could scientists read everything […]
A survey of a wide-ranging mix of U.S.-based arts organizations shows that the internet, social media, and mobile connectivity now permeate their operations and have changed the way they stage performances, mount and showcase their exhibits, engage their audiences, sell tickets, and raise funds. These organizations are even finding that technology has changed the very […]
The NMC Horizon Report > 2012 Museum Edition identifies six emerging technology topics, as well as key trends and critical challenges, through a research process designed and conducted by the NMC with the 2012 Museum Advisory Board. This international body of luminaries in the museum, education, and technology sectors engaged in a discussion based on a set of […]
Welcome to the American Converts Database With this database, you can explore the lives and relationships of converts in American history. Convert records are categorized by geographical location, date, religion, and sex, among others, and you can also track familial, social, and religious relationships between converts. Finally, you can collaborate with scholars around the world to deepen […]
