One of the more frustrating aspects of working in data-driven research today is the representation of such research by people who do not use data. Why? Because it is not subject to the same rules of evidence. If you don’t like data, it turns out you can say whatever you want about people who do...
Mark Algee-Hewitt and I recently took part in an interview with Elyse Graham for a special issue of English Studies on “Data Visualization and the Humanities.” You can read her introduction here and our interview here. We touch on a bunch of topics about visualization: like whether data visualization is exclusively exploratory, whether the humanities...
We are excited to announce the 2017-2018 Internship in Cultural Advocacy, focusing on gender bias in book reviews. The internship will address how women are both mis-represented and under-represented in the public discourse of book reviewing. Book reviews represent a significant cultural outlet that bestows authority, but as our lab’s new website called “Just Review” shows, there are a...
Less but better. That’s the essentialist’s motto and that’s the one I use every year when I revise my syllabus. I keep removing things and students keep learning more every year. While there is clearly a ceiling for this approach, it works remarkably well as a pedagogical tactic. Here’s the full syllabus. This year’s class...
Katherine Bode has written an excellent new piece asking us to reflect more on the data we use for computational literary studies. Her argument is that many of the current data sets available, which rely on date of first publication as a criteria for selection, miss the more socially imbedded ways literary texts have circulated...
We have had an excellent year at .txtLAB. I want to send out a special thanks to all of the students who have been contributing to the lab. You’ve made it a great place to work. Here is a list of projects that we’ve been working on this year: studying the ambiguity surrounding social interactions...
For years, women have been aware that their books are less likely to get reviewed in the popular press and they are also less likely to serve as reviewers of books. Projects like VIDA and CWILA were started to combat this kind of exclusion. Over time they have managed to make some change happen in the industry....
Eleanor & Park is a beautiful young adult novel about two kids who fall in love after meeting, as so many kids do, on the school bus. It also contains a perfect challenge for the computational study of culture. Think of it as an alternative to the Turing test. Here’s the back story. We’ve begun studying...
Looking forward to this event tomorrow. Bringing together researchers from different disciplines to develop models of cultural connectivity. Connectivity has become the dominant framework through which contemporary knowledge is increasingly understood. From networks to clouds to close reading to reconstructing historical social worlds, making connections is at the core of what academics are expected to do. And...
Last week Philip Mirowski gave a spirited polemic at Concordia University called, “What is Open Science supposed to fix?” Openness has become the new buzzword du jour. Who would be against openness? But do we really know what this word means? Over the course of an hour Mirowski made the case that open science is nothing less...
Increasing emphasis is being placed in the humanities on sharing data. Projects like the Open Syllabus Project, for example, have made a tremendous effort in discovering, collecting, and cleaning large amounts of data relevant to humanities research. Much of our data, however, is still locked-up behind copyright and paywalls within university libraries, even when the underlying...
Eva Portelance presented her work this past week that was completed under an Arts Undergraduate Research Internship (ARIA). Her project focuses on the computational detection of narrative frames. It involves three steps that include a theoretical definition of a frame, writing code to detect narrative frames and comparing those to existing methods of text segmentation, and...
