Network Analysis is a method to study the relations of (real or fictional) actors or other entities in a mediated network, which can take the form of a social or academic online network, a set of correspondence, or a work of literature; the resulting network is usually made up of nodes (entities) and edges (relations). Relevant techniques include Named Entity Recognition. When the artefacts themselves (texts, images, etc.) and their relations are concerned, the corresponding research activity would be Relational Analysis.
Introduction: Vistorian is a network analysis tool for digital humanists, especially historians. Its features have been specifically developed along basic principles of simplicity, privacy, openness and extensibility. The tool is part of the open-source Networkcube Project.
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Historical newspapers, already available in many digitized collections, may represent a significant source of information for the reconstruction of events and backgrounds, enabling historians to cast new light on facts and phenomena, as well as to advance new interpretations. Lausanne, University of Zurich and C2DH Luxembourg, the ‘impresso – Media Monitoring of the Past’ project wishes to offer an advanced corpus-oriented answer to the increasing need of accessing and consulting collections of historical digitized newspapers.
[…] Thanks to a suite of computational tools for data extraction, linking and exploration, impresso aims at overcoming the traditional keyword-based approach by means of the application of advanced techniques, from lexical processing to semantically deepened n-grams, from data modelling to interoperability.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Introduction: This lesson by Marten Düring from the “Programming Historian-Website” gently introduces novices to the topic to Network Visualisation of Historical Sources. As a case study it covers not only the general advantages of network visualisation for humanists but also a step-by-step explanation of the process from extraction of the data until the visualization (using the Palladio-tool). This lesson has also been translated into Spanish and includes many useful references for further reading.
Introduction: Know Your Implementation: Subgraphs in Literary Networks shows how the online tool ezlinavis can give account of detached subgraphs while working with network analysis of literary texts. For this specific case, Goethe’s Faust, Part One (1808) was analyzed and visualized with ezlinavis, and average distances were calculated giving some new results to this research in relation to Faust as protagonist.
Introduction: This article describes the possibilities offered by the ggplot2 package for network visualization. This R package enables the user to use a wide variety of graphic styles, and to include supplementary information regarding vertices and edges.
Introduction: This article introduces a novel way to unfold and discover patterns in complex texts, at the intersection between macro and micro analytics. This technique is called TIC (Transcendental Information Cascades) allows analysis of how a cast of characters is generated and managed dynamically over the duration of a text.