Bschmidt on Journal of Digital Humanities

Theory First

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It’s easy to be reasonable about the relationship we’d like to see between digital humanities and “Theory.” Each should inform the other. After all, humanists who put big-T Theory before any empirical data foolishly close their ears to the new evidence digital can create; digital humanists who ignore theory entirely jeopardize not only their careers but the soundness of their conclusions. To take two examples from the theory-friendly side of the spectrum in digital humanities; we should heed Natalia Cecire’s call to treat digital humanities as important because it transforms humanistic practice; but we should also be mindful of Ted Underwood’s concerns that claims for the primacy of theory often amount to little more than a power play, serving to reify existing class distinctions inside the academy. In practice, this probably means digital humanists can keep calm and carry on, with greater tolerance for the occasional French name tossed into the discussion; meanwhile the theory-inclined should know they have a seat at the new table, though not necessarily at the head. Even more hack, better yack. What’s not to love?

Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As this issue shows, there is no shortage of interest among humanists in using topic modeling. An entire genre of introductory posts has emerged encouraging humanists to try LDA.¹ So many scholars in humanities departments are turning to the tool in their research that it is sometimes described as part of the digital humanities in itself. Last fall, the NEH sponsored a workshop at Maryland which expressed concern that “the most promising work in topic modeling is being done not by humanists exploring literary or historical corpora but instead by scholars working in natural language processing and information retrieval.” There is not, it seems safe to say, another machine-learning algorithm in the world anyone would expect humanists to lead the progress of. Newcomers to the field could be forgiven for thinking that digital humanists need to topic model to prove their mettle; analog humanists could be forgiven for assuming that the computational interests of literary scholars and historians are particularly focused on the sorts of questions that topic models answer.

Code Appendix for “Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities”

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Topic Modeling Ships

Begin by getting the data in order. (This data is available on request.)

# Oceans2
rm(list = ls())
require(ggplot2)
require(plyr)
require(lubridate)
source("ICOADS parsing.R")
source("../Map Functions.R")

This step pulls in the Maury data and splits it. This is not fully documented as part of this article, since the purpose is to show general geodata parsing.

data = loadInData("~/shipping/ICOADS/maury.txt")
data = splitDataByVoyage(data)

Next, save the R data.frame into a directory that MALLET will be able to interpret as a text, and run a topic model on it. The rounding gives the resolution at which the topic will be run.