After five years “workin’ on the railroad,” I find myself confronting one of the central paradoxes of doing digital humanities–what Jerome McGann, one of the leading scholars of electronic texts, calls the problem of imagining what you don’t know.
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The WordSeer tool, developed at the University of California, Berkley by Aditi Muralidharan and Marti Hearst with research partner Bryan Wagner, is an exploratory analysis or “sensemaking” environment for literary texts.
Bookworm is a tool that allows users to create visualizations charting the use of words or phrases in selected large corpora over specified periods of time. The software was developed by a group of researchers at the Harvard University Cultural Observatory as a follow-up to the 2010 project that resulted in a cover story in Science, the Google Books Ngram Viewer, and the coining of the term ‘culturomics’.
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[A note from the author: This blog post, as a piece of prose, is very much of the moment when it was written. Likewise its reception has been based on its tone as well as its content.
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When disciplines collide, as they do throughout digital humanities, the various practitioners mutually benefit from the different knowledge and skill sets that others bring to our collaborations. But there is also an inevitable gap between how different individuals working in different areas understand their various tools and techniques, and in how they understand their own thought processes.
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