Big Data: Text Mining in the Digital Humanities
"Not surprisingly the focus on research methodology in the presentations was also explicitly articulated as an important aspect of drawing out a scholarly practice for the Digital Humanities. It was emphasized that the disclosure of the philosophical and technological rational behind a research methodology is important to develop a sort of academic accountability. These methodological choices are deliberate and meaningfully affect the results of a study.
The rigorous process of explaining and justifying the methodological process is in effect a safe guard against spurious use of computational and statistical tools. 'Big Data' will not allow for humanistic arguments to be proved statistically. Instead it is about producing a dialectic between analytic and anecdotal, such that the computational tools of computers can be assimilated into the process of humanistic scholarship. An important aspect of this is to develop meaningful visualizations to render data readable."
(Mark Turcato, 18 May 2012, Digital Humanities McGill)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
National Archives of Australia: Archives Viewer
"Say hello to the Archives Viewer (naming things isn't really one of my strengths). Instead of rewriting my existing script I decided to create a completely new web application. Why? Mainly because it gave me a lot more flexibility. I could also make use of a variety of existing tools and frameworks like Django, Bootstrap, Isotope and FancyBox. Standing upon the code of giants, I had the whole thing up and running in a single weekend. The code is available on GitHub.
What does it do? Simply put, just feed the Archives Viewer the barcode of a digitised file in RecordSearch and it grabs the metadata and images and displays them in a variety of useful ways. It's really pretty simple, both in execution and design.
Yep, there's a wall. It's not quite as spacey and zoom-y as the CoolIris version, but perhaps that's a good thing. It's just a flat wall of page image thumbnails with a bit of lightbox-style magic thrown in. But when I say just, well... look for yourself. There's something a bit magical about seeing all the pages of a file at once, taking in their shapes and colours as well as their content. This digital wall provides a strangely powerful reminder of the physical object.
Of course you can also view the file page by page if you want. Printing is a snap - just type in any combination of pages or page ranges and hit the button. The images and metadata are assembled ready to print. No more wondering 'which file did this print out come from?'.
But perhaps the most important feature is that each page has it's own unique, persistent url. Basic stuff, but oh, so important. With a good url you can share and cite. Find something exciting? Tell the world about it! I've included your typical social media share buttons to help you along."
(Tim Sherratt, 29 August 2012)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Journal of Digital Humanities
"The Journal of Digital Humanities (ISSN 2165-6673) is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter.
The Journal of Digital Humanities offers expanded coverage of the digital humanities in three ways. First, by publishing scholarly work beyond the traditional research article. Second, by selecting content from open and public discussions in the field. Third, by encouraging continued discussion through peer-to-peer review.
The Journal of Digital Humanities selects content from the Editors' Choice pieces from Digital Humanities Now, which highlights the best scholarship—in whatever form—that drives the field of digital humanities field forward. The Journal of Digital Humanities provides three additional layers of evaluation, review, and editing to the pieces initially identified by Digital Humanities Now.
The Journal of Digital Humanities and Digital Humanities Now are produced by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.
Editors: Daniel J. Cohen, Joan Fragaszy Troyano. Associate Editors: Sasha Hoffman, Jeri Wieringa.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Digital Humanities Now
"Digital Humanities Now showcases the scholarship and news of interest to the digital humanities community through a process of aggregation, discovery, curation, and review. Digital Humanities Now also is an experiment in ways to identify, evaluate, and distribute scholarship on the open web through a weekly publication and the quarterly Journal of Digital Humanities."
Editorial Board: Dan Cohen, Editor-in-Chief; Joan Fragaszy Troyano, Managing Editor; Sasha Hoffman, Editor; Jeri Wieringa, Editor.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0
"'Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.'
Thus begins the Digital Humanities Manifesto a document originally authored by Todd Presner (UCLA) and Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford), for the Mellon Seminars in Digital Humanities."
(David Green, 15 June 2009, Academic Commons)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
