Author: Author on Source

Getting started with OpenRefine – Digital Humanities 201

Getting started with OpenRefine – Digital Humanities 201

Introduction: Open Refine, the freely accessible successor to Google Refine, is an ideal tool for cleaning up data series and thus obtaining more sustainable results. Entries can be searched in alphabetical order or sorted by frequency, so that typing errors or slightly different variants can be easily found and adjusted. For example, with the help of the software, I discovered two such discrepancies in my Augustinian Correspondence Database, which I am now able to correct with one click in the programme. I was shown that I had noted “As a reference to Jerome’s letter it’s not counted” five times and “As a reference to Jerome’s letter, it’s not counted” three times. Consequently, if I searched the database for this expression, I would not see all the results. A second discrepancy was between the entry “continuing reference (marked by Nam)” and the entry “continuing reference (marked by nam)”. Thanks to Open Refine, such errors can be completely avoided in the future.

The tutorial by Miriam Posner is a useful introduction to come in touch with the software. However, the first step of the installation is already out of date. While version 3.1 was still the latest when the tutorial was published, it is now version 3.5.2. Under Windows, you can now distinguish between a version that requires Java and a version with embedded OpenJDK Java, which I found very pleasing.

If needed, there are links at the end of the tutorial to other introductions that go into more depth.

Read More
Worthäufigkeiten als Quelle für die Geschichtswissenschaft? – Einblicke in die Digital Humanities

Worthäufigkeiten als Quelle für die Geschichtswissenschaft? – Einblicke in die Digital Humanities

Introduction: Especially humanities scholars (not only historians) who have not yet had any contact with the Digital Humanities, Silke Schwandt offers a motivating and vivid introduction to see the potential of this approach, using the analysis of word frequencies as an example. With the help of Voyant Tools and Nopaque, she provides her listeners with the necessary equipment to work quantitatively with their corpora. Schwandt’s presentation, to which the following report by Maschka Kunz, Isabella Stucky and Anna Ruh refers, can also be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJvbC3b1yPc.

Read More
Research COVID-19 with AVOBMAT

Research COVID-19 with AVOBMAT

Introduction: In our guidelines for nominating content, databases are explicitly excluded. However, this database is an exception, which is not due to the burning issue of COVID-19, but to its exemplary variety of digital humanities methods with which the data can be processed.AVOBMAT makes it possible to process 51,000 articles with almost every conceivable approach (Topic Modeling, Network Analysis, N-gram viewer, KWIC analyses, gender analyses, lexical diversity metrics, and so on) and is thus much more than just a simple database – rather, it is a welcome stage for the Who is Who (or What is What?) of OpenMethods.

Read More
Web Scraping with Python for Beginners | The Digital Orientalist

Web Scraping with Python for Beginners | The Digital Orientalist

Introduction: In this blog post, James Harry Morris introduces the method of web scraping. Step by step from the installation of the packages, readers are explained how they can extract relevant data from websites using only the Python programming language and convert it into a plain text file. Each step is presented transparently and comprehensibly, so that this article is a prime example of OpenMethods and gives readers the equipment they need to work with huge amounts of data that would no longer be possible manually.

Read More
Narrelations — Visualizing Narrative Levels and their Correlations with Temporal Phenomena

Narrelations — Visualizing Narrative Levels and their Correlations with Temporal Phenomena

Introduction: Introduction by OpenMethods Editor (Christopher Nunn): Information visualizations are helpful in detecting patterns in large amounts of text and are often used to illustrate complex relationships. Not only can they show descriptive phenomena that could be revealed in other ways, albeit slower and more laborious, but they can also heuristically generate new knowledge. The authors of this article did just that. The focus here is, fortunately, on narratological approaches that have so far hardly been combined with digital text analyzes, but which are ideally suited for them. To eight German novellas a variety of interactive visualizations were created, all of which show: The combination of digital methods with narratological interest can provide great returns to Literary Studies work. After reading this article, it pays to think ahead in this field.

Read More
Do humanists need BERT?

Do humanists need BERT?

Introduction: Ted Underwood tests a new language representation model called “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers” (BERT) and asks if humanists should use it. Due to its high degree of difficulty and its limited success (e.g. in questions of genre detection) he concludes, that this approach will be important in the future but it’s nothing to deal with for humanists at the moment. An important caveat worth reading.

Read More
Little package, big dependency

Little package, big dependency

Introduction: The world of R consists of innumerous packages. Most of them have very little download rates because they are limited to certain functions as part of a larger argument. Based on a surprising experience with the small package clipr Matthew Lincoln shares his thoughts about this reception phenomenon especially in the digital humanities.

Read More