Welcome to the
Journal of Digital Humanities
Vol. 2, No. 1 Winter 2012
The Journal of Digital Humanities is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter.
Available for download
Introductions
Pacing Scholarly Conversations
The Editors
The advancement of scholarship relies on the timely communication of questions, methods, results, and reflections. The iterative publications Digital Humanities Now and the Journal of Digital Humanities are intended to facilitate this process. DHNow surfaces and distributes the conversations weekly in order to invite participation and feedback. The Journal of Digital Humanities then identifies the […]
The Digital Humanities Contribution to Topic Modeling
Elijah Meeks and Scott B. Weingart
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 […]
Beginnings
Topic Modeling and Digital Humanities
David M. Blei
Topic Modeling: A Basic Introduction
Megan R. Brett
The Details: Training and Validating Big Models on Big Data
David Mimno
"A model of texts, built with a particular theory in mind, cannot provide evidence for the theory."
Some of the topics found by analyzing 1.8 million articles from the New York Times
Clusters of voyages in the Maury Collection generated by a simple k-means algorithm
"The strictly linguistic character of this technique is a limitation as well as a strength."
Applications and Critiques
Topic Modeling and Figurative Language
Lisa M. Rhody
Topic Model Data for Topic Modeling and Figurative Language
Lisa M. Rhody
What Can Topic Models of PMLA Teach Us About the History of Literary Scholarship?
Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood
Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities
Benjamin M. Schmidt
Code Appendix for "Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities"
Benjamin M. Schmidt
Reviews
Review of MALLET, produced by Andrew Kachites McCallum
Shawn Graham and Ian Milligan
Review of Paper Machines, produced by Chris Johnson-Roberson and Jo Guldi
Adam Crymble
"For historians, literary scholars, and other humanities researchers, MALLET is a valuable addition to your toolkit."
The results of a topic model, showing 25 topics found across a database of nearly 15,000 song lyric files.
open for reader responses
ISSN 2165-6673