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.

Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II

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

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.

Sweingart on Journal of Digital Humanities

The Digital Humanities Contribution to Topic Modeling

Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II

Part 1 of n: An Introduction