Analysis

OpenMethods Spotlights #1: Interview with Hilde De Weerdt about MARKUS

Posted on October 13, 2020October 13, 2020
by Alíz Horváth

OpenMethods Spotlights showcase people and epistemic reflections behind Digital Humanities tools and methods. You can find here brief interviews with the creator(s) of the blogs or tools that are highlighted on OpenMethods to humanize and contextualize them. In the first episode, Alíz Horváth is talking with Hilde de Weerdt at Leiden University about MARKUS, a tool that offers offers a variety of functionalities for the markup, analysis, export, linking, and visualization of texts in multiple languages, with a special focus on Chinese and now Korean as well.

Analysis

MARKUS – Comprehensive tool with the needs of non-Latin script users in mind

Posted on October 11, 2020October 13, 2020
by Alíz Horváth

East Asian studies are still largely underrepresented in digital humanities. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is the relative lack of tools and methods which could be used smoothly with non-Latin scripts. MARKUS, developed by Brent Ho within the framework of the Communication and Empire: Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective project led by Hilde de Weerdt at Leiden University, is a comprehensive tool which helps mitigate this issue. Selected as a runner up in the category “Best tool or suite of tools” in the DH2016 awards, MARKUS offers a variety of functionalities for the markup, analysis, export, linking, and visualization of texts in multiple languages, with a special focus on Chinese and now Korean as well.

Analysis

Zur Digitalisierung der Materialität mittelalterlicher Objekte. Ein Bericht aus der wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Werkstatt

Posted on August 11, 2020August 12, 2020
by Erzsebet Tóth-Czifra

Introduction: In this blog post, Michael Schonhardt explores and evaluates a range of freely available, Open Source tools – Inkscape, Blender, Stellarium, Sketchup – that enable the digital, 3D modelling of medieval scholarly objects. These diverse tools bring easily implementable solutions for both the analysis and the communication of results of object-related cultural studies and are especially suitable for projects with small budgets.

Archiving

Exposing legacy project datasets in Digital Humanities | King’s Digital Lab

Posted on July 28, 2020July 29, 2020
by Erzsebet Tóth-Czifra

Introduction: Issues around sustaining digital project outputs after their funding period is a recurrent topic on OpenMethods. In this post, Arianna Ciula introduces the King’s Digital Lab’s solution, a workflow around their CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network) instance, and uncovers the many questions around not only maintaining a variety of legacy resources from long-running projects, but also opening them up for data re-use, verification and integration beyond siloed resources.

Capture

Audio-Dateien zusammenführen und konvertieren in Audacity (Windows)

Posted on July 6, 2020July 15, 2020
by Erzsebet Tóth-Czifra

Introduction: As online became the default means of teaching globally, the thoughtful use of online technologies will play an even more critical role in our everyday life. In this post, Christopher Nunn guides you through how to publish your lectures as podcasts as MP3 with the help of the open source tool, Audacity. The tutorial had been published as a guest post on Mareike Schuhmacher’s blog, Lebe lieber literarisch.

Capture

RAWGraphs: A Visualization Platform to Create Open Outputs

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020
by Marinella Testori

The paper illustrates the features of the innovative tool in the field of data visualization: it is the framework RAW Graphs, available in an open access format at the website https://rawgraphs.io/. The framework permits to establish a connection between data coming from various applications (from Microsoft Excel to Google Spreadsheets) and their visualization in several layouts.

As detailed in the video guide available in the ‘Learning section’ (https://rawgraphs.io/learning), it is possible to load own data through a simple ‘copy and past’ command, and then select a chart-based layout among those provided: contour plot, beeswarm plot, hexagonal binnings, scatterplot, treemap, bump chart, Gantt chart, multiple pie charts, alluvial diagram and barchart. The platform permits also to unstack data according to a wide and a narrow format.

RAWGraphs, ideal for those working in the field of design but not only, is kept as an open-source resource thanks to an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign (https://rawgraphs.io/blog).
[click ‘Read’ for more]

Contextualizing

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

Posted on February 23, 2020February 25, 2020
by Marinella Testori

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.

Code

Web Scraping with Python for Beginners | The Digital Orientalist

Posted on February 4, 2020February 5, 2020
by Christopher Nunn

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.

Cleanup

Diseño de corpus literario para análisis cuantitativos

Posted on January 29, 2020
by Gimena Del Rio

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.

Assessing

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

Posted on October 10, 2019October 23, 2019
by Erzsebet Tóth-Czifra

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.