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Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2011: Featured Article Excerpts

“Modern humanities scholarship is a direct engagement with a deracinated, Google-ised, Wikipedia-ised, electronic text.”
Tim Hitchcock

An ego network from wikipedia.org



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Academic History Writing and its Disconnects

The last ten years have seen the development of what looks like a coherent format for the publication of inherited texts online – in particular, ‘books’. The project of putting billions of words of keyword searchable text is now nearing completion (at least in a Western context); and the hard intellectual work that went into this project is now done.

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Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?

Data seems to be the word of the moment for scholarship. The National Endowment for the Humanities and a range of other funders are inviting scholars to “dig data” in their “Digging into Data” grant program.

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Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II

Part 1 of n: An Introduction

This piece builds on a bunch of my recent blog posts that have mentioned networks. Elijah Meeks already has prepared a good introduction to network visualizations on his own blog, so I cover more of the conceptual issues here, hoping to reach people with little-to-no background in networks or math, and specifically to digital humanists interested in applying network analysis to their own work.

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Clustering with Compression for the Historian

INTRODUCTION

I mentioned in my blog that I’m playing around with a variety of clustering techniques to identify patterns in legal records from the early modern Spanish Empire. In this post, I will discuss the first of my training experiments using Normalized Compression Distance (NCD).

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