Category Archives: Big Data

Is Digital Humanities Too Text-Heavy?

Last week was the marvelous international conference for digital humanities, held this year at beautiful University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Over the course of 4 days, I tried desperately to meet people I only knew from tiny Twitter pictures or gitHub or … Continue reading

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, Big Data, Natural Law, New Literature, Spatial Humanities, Text Analysis | 3 Comments

Mesoanalysis

With Matt Jockers’ new book out, and the reviews already coming in, I’m starting to find the macroanalysis/microanalysis framework a little lacking. It’s not that I don’t think it a good approach, and it takes many forms in digital humanities … Continue reading

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The Digital Humanities as a Big Data Conference

The IEEE International Conference on Big Data in July will feature a workshop on Big Data in digital humanities scholarship–which its organizers refer to as Big Humanities. It’s hard to tell what big data means these days. Is 30,000 British … Continue reading

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TVTropes Pt 2: Trope (But Not Troper) Communities

Part 1: The Weird Geometry of the Internet Part 3: If you liked Dwarf Fortress, you’ll love Twilight: Breaking Dawn Example of Thematic Relationships I received quite a few comments about the last article, most of which I haven’t approved, … Continue reading

Posted in Big Data, Interview, Natural Law, New Literature, Social Media Literacy, Text Analysis, Visualization | 3 Comments

TVTropes Pt 1: The Weird Geometry of the Internet

Part 2: Trope (but not Troper) Communities Part 3: If you liked Dwarf Fortress, you’ll love Twilight: Breaking Dawn Example of Thematic Relationships HP Lovecraft popularized a certain type of malevolent force, something so massive and powerful and unconcerned and … Continue reading

Posted in Big Data, Graph Data Model, Interview, New Literature, Social Media Literacy, Visualization | 9 Comments

HASTAC V: The Search for More Digital Humanities

I’m here at the HASTAC conference at the beautiful and only slightly snowy University of Michigan, where Dan Atkins has explained how cyberinfrastructure works from the e-science perspective.  He notes that the NSF can’t fund “humanist” endeavors, but is amenable … Continue reading

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Comparing Population Density and Wikipedia Density on GIS Day

One of the responses I’ve heard to the Wikipedia Map in the last post is that it tracks to population density, so I grabbed a population density map from SEDAC and created a few comparative maps at similar scales to … Continue reading

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Mapping Wikipedia: Geolocated Articles as a Proxy of Culture and Attention

You can see further maps examining the relationship between population density and Wikipedia article density here. Such is the nature of the modern university that a sudden spark of inspiration can lead to a quick and radical dive into data … Continue reading

Posted in Big Data, Spatial Humanities, Visualization | 3 Comments

Networks in the Humanities, a Visual Exploration

I’m not very good at keeping a secret, especially when I have draft after draft of Skittles-colored networks to show off, but I tried my best this time to keep this process under my hat until I had something to … Continue reading

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Everything is a Graph and Drawing It as Such is Always the Best Thing to Do

Well, maybe that’s going a little too far, but Sébastien Heymann has written an excellent response to the Ben Fry quote brought to the fore by Dan Brickley’s recent exploration of literary networks. Ben Fry’s quote in full goes like … Continue reading

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