Category: Languages

Mining ethnicity: Discourse-driven topic modelling of immigrant discourses in the USA, 1898–1920

Mining ethnicity: Discourse-driven topic modelling of immigrant discourses in the USA, 1898–1920

Introduction: The article illustrates the application of a ‘discourse-driven topic modeling’ (DDTM) to the analysis of the corpus ChronicItaly comprising several newspapers in Italian language, appeared in the USA during the time of massive migration towards America between the end of the XIX century and the first two decades of the XX (1898-1920).

The method combines both Text Modelling (™) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA) in order to get a more comprehensive representation of the ethnocultural and linguistic identity of the Italian group of migrants in the historical American context in crucial periods of time like that immediately preceding the eruption and that of the unfolding of World War I.

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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.

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Diseño de corpus literario para análisis cuantitativos

Diseño de corpus literario para análisis cuantitativos

Introduction: In this article, José Calvo Tello offers a methodological guide on data curation for creating literary corpus for quantitative analysis. This brief tutorial covers all stages of the curation and creation process and guides the reader towards practical cases from Hispanic literature. The author deals with every single step in the creation of a literary corpus for quantitative analysis: from digitization, metadata, automatic processes for cleaning and mining the texts, to licenses, publishing and achiving/long term preservation.

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A World of Possibilities: a corpus-based approach to the diachrony of modality in Latin

A World of Possibilities: a corpus-based approach to the diachrony of modality in Latin

Introduction: Hosted at the University of Lausanne, “A world of possibilities. Modal pathways over an extra-long period of time: the diachrony in the Latin language” (WoPoss) is a project under development exploiting a corpus-based approach to the study and reconstruction of the diachrony of modality in Latin.
Following specific annotation guidelines applied to a set of various texts pertaining to the time span between 3rd century BCE and 7th century CE, the work team lead by Francesca Dell’Oro aims at analyzing the patterns of modality in the Latin language through a close consideration of lexical markers.

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Digital scholarship workflows

Digital scholarship workflows

Introduction:  In this post, you can find a thoughtful and encouraging selection and description of reading, writing and organizing tools. It guides you through a whole discovery-magamement-writing-publishing workflow from the creation of annotated bibliographies in Zotero,  through a useful Markdown syntax cheat sheet  to versioning, storage and backup strategies, and shows how everybody’s research can profit by open digital methods even without sophisticated technological skills. What I particularly like in Tomislav Medak’s approach is that all these tools, practices and tricks are filtered through and tested again his own everyday scholarly routine. It would make perfect sense to create a visualization from this inventory in a similar fashion to these workflows.

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Pipelines for languages: not only Latin! The Italian NLP Tool (Tint)

Pipelines for languages: not only Latin! The Italian NLP Tool (Tint)

The StandforCore NLP wishes to represent a complete Java-based set of tools for various aspects of language analysis, from annotation to dependency parsing, from lemmatization
to coreference resolution. It thus provides a range of tools which
can be potentially applied to other languages apart from English.

Among the languages to which the StandfordCore NLP is mainly applied there is Italian, for which the Tint pipeline has been developed as described in the paper “Italy goes to Stanford: a collection of CoreNLP modules for Italian” by Alessio Palmero Apostolo and Giovanni Moretti.

On the Tint webpage the whole pipeline can be found and downloaded: it comprises tokenization and sentence splitting, morphological analysis and lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, named-entity recognition and dependency parsing, including wrappers under construction. [Click ‘Read more’ for the whole post.]

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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.

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DH Research Software Engineers – For We Are Many

DH Research Software Engineers – For We Are Many

Introduction: This white paper is an outcome of a DH2019 workshop dedicated to foster closer collaboration among technology-oriented DH researchers and  developers of tools to support Digital Humanities research. The paper briefly outlines the most pressing issues in their collaboration and addresses topics such as: good practices to ease mutual understanding between scholars and researchers; software development and academic career and recognition; or sustainability and funding.

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Topic Modeling mit dem DARIAH Topics Explorer | forTEXT

Topic Modeling mit dem DARIAH Topics Explorer | forTEXT

Introduction: The first steps into working with digital methods of text analysis are often made with beginner-friendly tools. The DARIAH-DE TopicsExplorer opens up the world of topic modeling with an easy-to-understand GUI, numerous operating options and high-quality results. The team of forText of the University of Hamburg developed a tutorial (Lerneinheit) to guide users step by step from installing the software to the first results with a sample corpus. The tutorial also contains screenshots, videos, exercises and explanations. This follows the didactic concept of forText.

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