Category: Software

Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python — Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python

Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python — Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python

Introduction: Folgert Karsdorp, Mike Kestemont and Allen Riddell ‘s  interactive book, Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python had been written with the aim in mind to equip humanities students and scholars working with textual and tabular resources with practical, hands-on knowledge to better understand the potentials of data-rich, computer-assisted approaches that the Python framework offers to them and eventually to apply and integrate them to their own research projects.

The first part introduces a “Data carpentry”, a collection of essential techniques for gathering, cleaning, representing, and transforming textual and tabular data. This sets the stage for the second part that consists of 5 case studies (Statistics Essentials: WhoReads Novels? ; Introduction to Probability ; Narrating with Maps ; Stylometry and the Voice of Hildegard ; A Topic Model of United States Supreme Court Opinions, 1900–2000 ) showcasing how to draw meaningful insights from data using quantitative methods. Each chapter contains executable Python codes and ends with exercises ranging from easier drills to more creative and complex possibilities to adapt the apply and adopt the newly acquired knowledge to their own research problems.

The book exhibits best practices in how to make digital scholarship available in an open, sustainable ad digital-native manner, coming in different layers that are firmly interlinked with each other. Published with Princeton University Press in 2021, hardcopies are also available, but more importantly, the digital version is an  Open Access Jupyter notebook that can be read in multiple environments and formats (.md and .pdf). The documentation, coda and data materials are available on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/3560761#.Y3tCcn3MJD9). The authors also made sure to select and use packages which are mature and actively maintained.

Read More
GROBID: when data extraction becomes a suite

GROBID: when data extraction becomes a suite

Introduction: GROBID is an already well-known open source tool in the field of Digital Humanities, originally built to extract and parse bibliographical metadata from scholarly works. The acronym stands for GeneRation Of BIbliographic Data.
Shaped by use cases and adoptions to a range of different DH and non-DH settings, the tool has been progressively evolved into a suite of technical features currently applied to various fields, like that of journals, dictionaries and archives.
[Click ‘Read more’ for the full post!]

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

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

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.

Read More
‘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.

Read More
The Research Software Directory and how it promotes software citation

The Research Software Directory and how it promotes software citation

Introduction: The Research Software Directory of the Netherlands eScience Institute provides easy access to software, source code and its documentation. More importantly, it makes it easy to cite software, which is highly advisable when using software to derive research results. The Research Software Directory positions itself as a platform that eases scientific referencing and reproducibility of software based research—good peer praxis that is still underdeveloped in the humanities. 

Read More

The Migrant Letter Digitised: Visualising Metadata

Introduction: The article discusses how letters are being used across the disciplines, identifying similarities and differences in transcription, digitisation and annotation practices. It is based on a workshop held after the end of the project Digitising experiences of migration: the development of interconnected letters collections (DEM). The aims were to examine issues and challenges surrounding digitisation, build capacity relating to correspondence mark-up, and initiate the process of interconnecting resources to encourage cross-disciplinary research. Subsequent to the DEM project, TEI templates were developed for capturing information within and about migrant correspondence, and visualisation tools were trialled with metadata from a sample of letter collections. Additionally, as a demonstration of how the project’s outputs could be repurposed and expanded, the correspondence metadata that was collected for DEM was added to a more general correspondence project, Visual Correspondence.

Read More