Digging into Data: Global Currents

What can you learn from the visual features of a page?

This is the question that lies at the centre of our digging into data project, the awards for which were announced yesterday. A vast amount of our textual heritage has so far been resistant to large-scale data analysis, whether it is non-western scripts or early- or pre-print documents. These are works that don’t lend themselves well to current OCR technology and thus to the usual approaches of data and text mining – which makes data preparation and analysis an extremely long and drawn out process.

Partnering with Mohamed Cheriet at the Synchromedia Lab at the École de technologie supérieure in Montreal and Lambert Schomaker of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Groningen University in the Netherlands, we will be applying new image-processing techniques to better understand the relations between pages at the visual level. Rather than OCR a text and compare the relations between words, we want to know how it is that pages correlate with one another through their visual features. How much semantic information is contained in the visual dimensions of a page and what other kinds of information is encoded there — whether it be indeces of scribal communities or perhaps styles of ornamentation that marked different periods or cultures? Although we think of texts as things that we read, texts are first and foremost visual objects. Our goal is thus to account for new kinds of texts and new kinds of textual information that have so far been missing from the big data turn.

This is just the first step, however. Our second principal question is: knowing something about the visual relations between pages, can we create larger maps of connections between texts in corpuses of writing that represent different world cultures at different historical junctures? Can we understand the networks of literary exchange that existed and helped define these different cultural formations of the past? To this end, we are bringing together four different databases for our analysis that have been curated by researchers at McGill and Stanford: post-classical Islamic philosophy (Robert Wisnovsky), Chinese Women’s Writing from the Ming-Qing Dynasties (Grace Fong), the Anglo-Saxon Middle-Ages (Elaine Treharne), and the European Enlightenment (Andrew Piper/Mark Algee-Hewitt). These collections bring together writings from diverse spans of both time and space, from 1050, the beginnings of Islamic post-classical philosophy and the Anglo-Saxon high middle ages, to 1900, the onset of various global modernisms across China, the Middle East and Europe. Together they comprise 1,194,000 pages. Uniting each of these domains, we would suggest, is the shared sense of being a culture in transition. Our aim is thus as capacious as it is straightforward: how are these different transitional periods and places characterized by networks of shared ideas?

Partnering with Derek Ruths of the Network Dynamics Lab at McGill University, we will be asking some of the following questions regarding our different cultural collections:

• what texts were most central to a particular epoch? what do such texts have in common with one another?
• What texts play a mediating role between different communities of writing within a corpus? To make the bridge between different clusters of texts, what kinds of writing does one most often pass through?
• How are these different cultures themselves comprised of different textual communities? Do we find that different periods or cultures are marked by different degrees of communities (many smaller communities versus fewer strong concentrations)?
• How do ideas move across time? Are there strong correlations between works from similar time periods or do we find periods more defined by anachronism or recycling?