Category: Languages

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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Document ALL the things!| The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton

Document ALL the things!| The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton

Introduction: Sustainability questions such as how to maintain digital project outputs after the funding period, or how to keep aging code and infrastructure that are important for our research up-to-date are among the major challenges DH projects are facing today. This post gives us a sneak peek into the solutions and working practices from the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton. In their approach to build capacity for sustaining DH projects and preserve access to data and software, they view projects as collaborative and process-based scholarship. Therefore, their focus is on implementing project management workflows and documentation tools that can be flexibly applied to projects of different scopes and sizes and also allow for further refinement in due case. By sharing these resources together with their real-life use cases in DH projects, their aim is to benefit other scholarly communities and sustain a broader conversation about these tricky issues.

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The Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK): at the forefront of Digital Philology for historical languages

The Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK): at the forefront of Digital Philology for historical languages

Introduction: Natural Language Processing techniques applied to historical languages have been attracting an increasing interest in the academic community. Many online resources, like annotated corpora, are already available, as well as various methodologies and tools. However, for digital philologist dealing with these languages it appears important to rely on a specific pipeline, on a sequence of working steps and applications thanks to which accomplishing an effective text analysis.
This need is addressed by the Classical Language Toolkit, as illustrated by Patrick J. Burns in his contribution “Building a Text Analysis Pipeline for Classical Languages”.

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Exploring internet with Hyphe

Exploring internet with Hyphe

Introduction: Given in French by Mathieu Jacomy – also known for his work on Gephi, this seminar presentation gives a substantial introduction to Hyphe, an open-source web crawler designed by a team of the Sciences Po Medialab in Paris. Specifically devised for the researchers’ use, Hyphe helps collecting and curating a corpus of web pages, through an easy to handle interface. 

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Analyzing Documents with TF-IDF | Programming Historian

Analyzing Documents with TF-IDF | Programming Historian

Introduction: The indispensable Programming Historian comes with an introduction to Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency (tf-idf) provided by Matthew J. Lavin. The procedure, concerned with specificity of terms in a document, has its origins in information retrieval, but can be applied as an exploratory tool, finding textual similarity, or as a pre-processing tool for machine learning. It is therefore not only useful for textual scholars, but also for historians working with large collections of text.

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Approaching Linked Data

Approaching Linked Data

Introduction: Linked Data and Linked Open Data are gaining an increasing interest and application in many fields. A recent experiment conducted in 2018 at Furman University illustrates and discusses some of the challenges from a pedagogical perspective posed by Linked Open Data applied to research in the historical domain.

“Linked Open Data to navigate the Past: using Peripleo in class” by Chiara Palladino describes the exploitation of the search-engine Peripleo in order to reconstruct the past of four archeologically-relevant cities. Many databases, comprising various types of information, have been consulted, and the results, as highlighted in the contribution by Palladino, show both advantages and limitations of a Linked Open Data-oriented approach to historical investigations.

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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.

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‘Voyant Tools’

‘Voyant Tools’

Introduction: Digital humanists looking for tools in order to visualize and analyze texts can rely on ‘Voyant Tools’ (https://voyant-tools.org), a software package created by S.Sinclair and G.Rockwell. Online resources are available in order to learn how to use Voyant. In this post, we highlight two of them: “Using Voyant-Tools to Formulate Research Questions for Textual Data” by Filipa Calado (GC Digital Fellows and the tutorial “Investigating texts with Voyant” by Miriam Posner.

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