Category: Analysis

This general research goal refers to the activity of extracting any kind of information from open or closed, structured or unstructured collections of data, of discovering recurring phenomena, units, elements, patterns, groupings, and the like. This can refer to structural, formal or semantic aspects of data. Analysis also includes methods used to visualize results. Methods and techniques related to this goal may be considered to follow Capture and Enrichment; however, Enrichment depends upon assumptions, research questions and results related to Analysis.

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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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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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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Evaluating named entity recognition tools for extracting social networks from novels

Evaluating named entity recognition tools for extracting social networks from novels

Introduction: Named Entity Recognition (NER) is used to identify textual elements that gives things a name. In this study, four different NER tools are evaluated using a corpus of modern and classic fantasy or science fiction novels. Since NER tools have been created for the news domain, it is interesting to see how they perform in a totally different domain. The article comes with a very detailed methodological part and the accompanying dataset is also made available.

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