FactGrid – a database for historians

FactGrid – a database for historians

FactGrid is both a database as well as a wiki. This project operated by the Gotha Research Centre and the data lab of the University of Erfurt. It utilizes MediaWiki and a Wikidata’s “wikibase” extension to collect data from historic research. With FactGrid you can create a knowledge graph, giving information in triple statements. This knowledge graph can be asked with SPARQL. All data provided by FactGrid holds a CC0-license.

What Counts as Culture? Part I: Sentiment Analysis of The Times Music Reviews, 1950-2009 – train in the distance

What Counts as Culture? Part I: Sentiment Analysis of The Times Music Reviews, 1950-2009 – train in the distance

Introduction: This blog post by Lucy Havens presents a sentiment analysis of over 2000 Times Music Reviews using freely available tools: defoe for building the corpus of reviews, VADER for sentiment analysis and Jupiter Notebooks to provide a rich documentation and to connect the different components of the analysis. The description of the workflow comes with tool and method criticism reflections, including an outlook how to improve and continue to get better and more results.

RAWGraphs: A Visualization Platform to Create Open Outputs

RAWGraphs: A Visualization Platform to Create Open Outputs

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).
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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.

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.

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. 

If These Crawls Could Talk: Studying and Documenting Web Archives Provenance

If These Crawls Could Talk: Studying and Documenting Web Archives Provenance

Introduction: With Web archives becoming an increasingly more important resource for (humanities) researchers, it also becomes paramount to investigate and understand the ways in which such archives are being built and how to make the processes involved transparent. Emily Maemura, Nicholas Worby, Ian Milligan, and Christoph Becker report on the comparison of three use cases and suggest a framework to document Web archive provenance.