What is PixPlot? (DH Tools) – YouTube

What is PixPlot? (DH Tools) – YouTube

Introduction: This short video teaser summarizes the main characteristics of PixPlot, a Python-based tool for clustering images and analyzing them from a numerical perspective as well as its pedagogical relevance as far as
machine learning is concerned.

The paper “Visual Patterns Discovery in Large Databases of Paintings”, presented at the Digital Humanities 2016 Conference held in Poland,
can be considered the foundational text for the development of the PixPlot Project at Yale University.
[Click ‘Read more’ for the full post!]

Find research data repositories for the humanities – the data deposit recommendation service

Find research data repositories for the humanities – the data deposit recommendation service

Introduction: Finding  suitable research data repositories that best match the technical or legal requirements of your research data is not always an easy task. This paper, authored by Stephan Buddenbohm, Maaikew de Jong, Jean-Luc Minel  and Yoann Moranville showcase the demonstrator instance of the Data Deposit Recommendation Service (DDRS), an application built on top of the re3data database specifically for scholars working in the Humanities domain. The paper  also highlights further directions of developing the tool, many of which implicitly bring sustainability issues to the table.

Voluntad y deseo en la filosofía moderna: un acercamiento computacional

Voluntad y deseo en la filosofía moderna: un acercamiento computacional

Introduction: in this study, Cebral Loureda analyzes how will and desire are conveyed in: Ethics, by Spinoza; The Phenomenology of Spirit, by Hegel; The World as Will and Representation, by Schopenhauer; and Thus spoke Zarathustra, by Nietzsche. With the idea of determining theses texts’ degree of cohesion, the author follows a computational and quantitative methodology to compare and contrast them, as well as assess their internal contradictions. A normalized corpus, statistics and visualizations are employed so as to evaluate the terminology, topoi and sentimentality of these works.  In relation to terminology, author’s findings revealed that Nietzsche uses a highly differentiated vocabulary from that of the other philosophers, adding marked emotional connotations to his discourse. Visualizations showed the terminological commonalities between Hegel and Schopenhauer and shed light on the former bearing the highest number of semantic connections with the other philosophers.  As for topoi, results showed there is a clear dichotomic tension between conceptual and vital experience in the studied documents. Redefining this dualism, however, Cebral Loureda observed that the concrete is always intertwined with the abstract and vice versa.  Regarding the sentimental dimension of these works, examination unveiled that Nietzsche’s presents the greatest negative sentimental load. In contrast, Spinoza’s is the most emotionally balanced. With all this, Cebral Loureda proves that there is a high degree of cohesion among these philosophical works, which link reason and emotion to will, time and spirit, core notions of modern philosophy and society.

The First of May in German Literature

The First of May in German Literature

Introduction by OpenMethods Editor (Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra): Research on date extractions from literature brings us closer to answering big questions of “when literature takes place”.  As Frank Fischer’s blog post, First of May in German literature shows, beyond mere quantification, this line of research also yields insights on the cultural significance of certain dates. In this case, the significance of 1st of May in German literature (as reflected in the “Corpus of German-Language Fiction” dataset) was determined with the help of a freely accessible data set and the open access tool HeidelTime. The brief description of the workflow is a smart demonstration of the potential of open DH methods and data sharing in sustainable ways.

Bonus one: the post starts out from briefly touching upon some of Frank’s public humanities activities.

Bonus two: mention of the Tiwoli (“Today in World Literature”) app, a fun side product built on to pof the date extraction research.

Worthäufigkeiten als Quelle für die Geschichtswissenschaft? – Einblicke in die Digital Humanities

Worthäufigkeiten als Quelle für die Geschichtswissenschaft? – Einblicke in die Digital Humanities

Introduction: Especially humanities scholars (not only historians) who have not yet had any contact with the Digital Humanities, Silke Schwandt offers a motivating and vivid introduction to see the potential of this approach, using the analysis of word frequencies as an example. With the help of Voyant Tools and Nopaque, she provides her listeners with the necessary equipment to work quantitatively with their corpora. Schwandt’s presentation, to which the following report by Maschka Kunz, Isabella Stucky and Anna Ruh refers, can also be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJvbC3b1yPc.

Offen, vielfältig und kreativ. Ein Bericht zum Barcamp Data Literacy #dhddatcamp20 bei der DHd 2020 | DHd-Blog

Offen, vielfältig und kreativ. Ein Bericht zum Barcamp Data Literacy #dhddatcamp20 bei der DHd 2020 | DHd-Blog

Introduction: What are the essential data literacy skills data literacy skills in (Digital) Humanities? How good data management practices can be translated to humanities disciplines and how to engage more and more humanists in such conversations? Ulrike Wuttke’s reflections on the “Vermittlung von Data Literacy in den Geisteswissenschaften“ barcamp at the DHd 2020 conference does not only make us heartfelt nostalgic about scholarly meetings happening face to face but it also gives in-depth and contextualized insights regarding the questions above. The post comes with rich documentation (including links to the barcamp’s metapad, tweets, photos, follow-up posts) and is also serve as a guide for organizers of barcamps in the future.

Research COVID-19 with AVOBMAT

Research COVID-19 with AVOBMAT

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.

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.