In all the GamerGate stories, an interesting move by Newsweek as to commission a study of GamerGate tweets. Taylor Wofford reported about the results in an article from October 25th, 2014 that is titled, Is GamerGate About Media Ethics or Harassing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows. The study was run by BrandWatch and they looked at…
Being a “public intellectual” in 2014 typically involves using social media. This brings many advantages for scholars, journalists, and other public thinkers. For example, sharing one’s writing on social media tends to increase readership, and being active on a service like Twitter can lead to the forging of many new, mutually beneficial professional relationships. I…
I’ve been seeing how deeply we could integrate topic models into the underlying Bookworm architecture a bit lately. My own chief interest in this, because I tend to be a little wary of topic models in general, is in the possibility for Bookworm to act as a diagnostic tool internally for topic models. I don’t think simply plotting description absent…
In terms of knocking down accepted historiographies, the results around sphere seemed most well received. Woman’s sphere is such an entrenched concept in the historiography of women’s history that the fact that female authors in the History of Woman Suffrage used sphere less than the male authors did is more than a little surprising.* The…
How should academics communicate their research to the general public? Maybe through memes, quizzes and click bait? If you’ve read Chris Rodley’s two part Buzzfeed posts on Post-Structuralism Explained With Hipster Beards you might actually nod and think that might not be such a bad idea. And here is an example of post-publication peer review for…
Code is often a difficult object to approach from a humanistic perspective. In some cases, scholars have approached code as if it were simply a piece of literature, generally coming to the conclusion that code makes for very poor literature (Kücklich, 2003). More often, however, computer code is not seen as a text in the…
The University of Victoria Libraries started archiving websites in 2013, and it quickly became apparent that many scholarly websites being produced by faculty, especially in the digital humanities, were going to prove very challenging to effectively capture and play back. This article will provide an overview of web archiving and explore the considerable legal and…
This essay is written in response to a colleague who, for the sake of anonymity, I will simply refer to as Dr. X (or perhaps, as @wallacetim dubs him, Professor Glasses). During the first ever #mapTimeLEX—an event inspired by @alyssapwright, and here in Lexington, largely an ode to @lyzidiamond and @mappingmashups—Dr. X graciously posed the…
This map visualizes the text-mined data produced by the Trading Consequences project. We queried the database to identify all the commodities with a strong relationship to London and then found every other location where the text mining pipeline identified a relationship those commodities at least 10 times in a given year. I will present this…
Too bad we can’t put to work the delicious usage data gathered by libraries. Research libraries may not know as much as click-obsessed Amazon does about how people interact with their books. What they do know, however, reflects the behavior of a community of scholars, and it’s unpolluted by commercial imperatives. But privacy concerns have…