Category: Interpretation

Interpretation is the activity of ascribing meaning to phenomena observed in Analysis. Therefore, interpretation usually follows analysis, although it could also be considered that interpretation defines the hermeneutic perspective of any method of analysis.

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

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

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.

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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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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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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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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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The Uncanny Valley and the Ghost in the Machine

The Uncanny Valley and the Ghost in the Machine

Introduction: There is a postulated level of anthropomorphism where people feel uncanny about the appearance of a robot. But what happens if digital facsimiles and online editions become nigh indistinguishable from the real, yet materially remaining so vastly different? How do we ethically provide access to the digital object without creating a blindspot and neglect for the real thing. A question that keeps digital librarian Dot Porter awake and which she ponders in this thoughtful contribution.

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Standardization Survival Kit – Create a dictionary in TEI

Standardization Survival Kit – Create a dictionary in TEI

Introduction: Standards are best explained in real life use cases. The Parthenos Standardization Survival Kit is a collection of research use case scenarios illustrating best practices in Digital Humanities and Heritage research. It is designed to support researchers in selecting and using the appropriate standards for their particular disciplines and workflows. The latest addition to the SSK is a scenario for creating a born-digital dictionary in TEI.

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Towards Semantic Enrichment of Newspapers: A Historical Ecology Use Case

Introduction: Ecologists are much aided by historical sources of information on human-animal interaction. But how does one cope with the plethora of different descriptions for the same animal in the historic record? A Dutch research group reports on how to aggregate ‘Bunzings’, ‘Ullingen’, and ‘Eierdieven’ (‘Egg-thieves’) into a useful historical ecology knowledge base.

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