Emeeks on Journal of Digital Humanities

The Digital Humanities Contribution to Topic Modeling

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

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 used tool, it runs in the command line. To achieve its results, it leverages occult statistical methods like “dirichlet priors” and “bayesian models.” Were a critic of digital humanities to dream up the worst stereotype of the field, he or she would likely create something very much like this, and then name a popular implementation of it after a hammer.

Digital Humanities as Thunderdome

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

Recently at a workshop on digital tools for the humanities, a Stanford graduate student rather poignantly noted that oftentimes collaboration with computer scientists felt more like colonization by computer scientists. This statement, even if not true, is far too sharp to ignore. Frankly, I think it is true. Not long after that workshop, I attended a THATCamp, where I spent my time teaching folks how to use Gephi, and I tried to spend some time telling them that the network they create is the result of an interpretive act. I don’t think they cared, I think they just wanted to know how to make node sizes change dynamically in tandem with partition filters. This is an issue that has concerned me for some time: the way wholesale importation of digital tools, techniques and objects into humanities scholarship tends to foster a situation where rich, sophisticated problems are contracted to fit conveniently into software.

Modeling Networks and Scholarship with ORBIS

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

ORBIS is self-defined as a historical transportation network model of the Roman world, but while it is fundamentally a computational model, it is also part of a genre of objects that could be referred to as interactive scholarly works, and so in explaining how to use ORBIS it becomes necessary to also engage with interactive scholarly works in general. What follows is not solely an explanation of ORBIS, but an exploration of the genre in a broader sense, providing both pragmatic and theoretical examples of the usage of both.

ORBIS: An Interactive Scholarly Work on the Roman World

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There are, broadly speaking, four expressions of digital humanities scholarship: research utilizing digital objects, tools, and methods; the publication of the products of that research; the creation, extension, and annotation of digital archives; and the development or improvement of digital tools. The boundaries between these are fluid; in particular, some products of digital humanities scholarship blur the line between archive, tool, and publication. ORBIS — the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World,¹ is one such hybrid. It is an interactive scholarly work (ISW) that comprises a digital archive of sites and routes, a tool for exploring Roman transportation, and an argument about the dynamic shape of the Roman world and the nature of transport within it. Furthermore, it makes a methodological argument that its representations — its computational model and visualizations — are a useful means for reasoning about those aspects of Roman history.