Digital Humanities Learning Community at OU

via Jula Ehrhardt -- the Digital Public Library of America is coming! April 18th! Here is the link to an article by Robert Darnton at the NYRB: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/25/national-digital-public-library-launched/?pagination=false

"These are my colour signatures, an ongoing collection which are basically graphs of all the visual content in the books. For example when it might say 'yellow brick road,' 'yellow' gets a tally, or when for example in The Road it says 'dark ash covered everything' (not an actual quote), that image evokes dark grey instantly in the mind, so dark grey gets a tally. They are then ordered into a spectrum and drawn up, so the result is a surprise to me until it is done."

Another visualization--this time of colors in texts. I thought the non-digital method of gathering data was interesting, though. Can programs get "dark grey" from "dark ash covered everything" yet?

Good description of current status of just-launched dpla

Heard this on NPR last night -- fascinating use of Google books to chart the national emotional climate.

that they found such defined patterns is certainly intriguing! I'll be interested to see how doing this sort of analysis with books compares with television -- closed captioning for more current time periods will allow this, although of course its a different challenge for the pre-captioned period...

Doing this sort of analysis with newspapers, news magazines, or neswcasts would also be very worthwhile.

Next Wednesday (4/10), a live stream will be available from ACRL for the presentation "Clear Pictures from Complex Data." The presentation is from 12-3:30 PM. The presentation will focus on how data visualization can help us see our world in new ways. Speakers include Noah Illinsky from IBM, Lorraine Haricombe from KU, and Cathy De Rosa from OCLC. Register online .

I'm registered. Looks like it's free to all to attend via live streaming.

Since it's ALA, we should be getting it automatically.

This looks great! Should be plunderable for relevant ideas! I love Melissa Terras' work -- she's co-director of Univ Col London's DH Centre, and has a blog here on DH: http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/

This is the site I mentioned in our meeting today that takes each frame of a film and compresses it down to a "slice" to give a visual overview of the movie. The database of movies is much larger than I thought.

It's like a visual fingerprint! I found a short discussion with the originator here: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-08/01/cinemetrics

enjoyed this database ... color theory + visual analysis would be an interesting lens to use when comparing/contrasting film genre and/or movie plot

a podcast by U of Louisvile English grad student, exploring what DH might mean in general, and what it might mean to him. Sounded like a similar path to our own coming out of the last weeks :)

Emil Johannsen has been generating a lot of buzz in Tolkien circles with the way he graphs and visualizes information from the texts. This particular chart helps the reader visualize the parallel structures of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings simply by showing distance traveled.

I'm not sure if Jason did this with a set of electronic texts, or if he used the Tolkien concordance published in 1990. In either case, he makes a good case for WHY something you can easily do with electronic texts -- word frequency analysis--can be useful: "When they aren't merely incidental, what sorts of things can we learn from hapax legomena? Well, it very much depends what we are looking for, but let me offer a few general observations. These single-use words may call our attention to particular sources, linguistic and literary, from which Tolkien borrowed, as well as give further indications of how he wove them into his work. Or we may learn something about the dialect used for particular characters when those characters conspicuously employ several hapaxes. Single occurrences of proper names help to demonstrate the breadth and depth of Tolkien's imagination (though I will not consider proper names in this essay). Hapax legomena may even hint at the presence of underlying themes, often deeply buried, but awaiting discovery through lexical analysis. And there is the potential for much more; you never quite know what you're going to find until you start looking."

Now there's a good example of something I'd never thought of looking for -- single-use words in a text! And certainly wouldn't be doable with non-digital texts in my case (there's nothing I'm that obsessive about to concordancize -- yes, I'm sure that's not a word!) But a machine can do it without effort on my part, and it would be a curious but perhaps intriguing exercise to try on a number of different sources...I love the idea of being able to do some examination of texts that is playful, just to see in what ways it stimulates thinking in different ways. Thanks for this!

Excellent advice on DH for newbies! It's the idea of "open notebook" sharing that I think is the most transformative dimension of DH...and it is one that 20thc academic print culture (and its reward system) is resistant to. I suspect the academy is going to lose a lot of fascinating potential recruits to graduate work in the humanities due to the constrictive, conservative nature of most humanities departments in regard to web 2.0 technologies....

Here's how I reviewed this piece: "Next we turn to the subject of corpus-stylistic criticism, which involves the computer-assisted analysis of vocabulary used in a selected portion of an author's output. It can be as simple as a word frequency list (the sort used to generate "word cloud" visual representations) or as complex as semantic tagging which places individual words into linguistic categories. Patrick Maiwald analyzes forty-one items of MacDonald's fiction, first at a simple word-frequency level, then in comparison with a similar group of contemporary Victorian fiction, and continuing on to more complex analysis of phrases and tagging. Maiwald freely admits that this sort of analysis is very limited and does not really have a great deal of importance on its own at present, but it can bring precision and corroboration to the study of an author's particular style or the development of themes and influences over his lifetime."

A site for discussion and projects where DH interesects with gaming.

Open access book published by the Modern Language Association. No login required for reading.

Good source to pull some articles for communal reading, perhaps.

An interesting reflection on some of the most basic ways in which the existence of the Internet has changed what is possible in terms of various aspects of literatry/historical research -- mundane tasks as well as more complex issues -- and offers a useful examination of the moment when the shift from web 1.0 to web 2.0 was happening.

ds106 is an open online course that anyone can take -- it's not massive like the moocs that are getting all the big media attention this year. But it is a fascinating effort to create an open learning environment that is accessible to anyone, but through active engagement rather than passive "watch a video" mode. Here's a short article from insidehighered: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/24/open-course-digital-storytelling-enjoys-modest-success