A brief intro to Digital HumanitiesKalani CraigClinical Assistant ProfessorIndiana University—Bloomington

@kalanicraig

Around DH in 80 Days © 2014 Alex Gil

“Digital” in Arts & Humanities

Computational tools in humanities tasks

Why is it useful?

Ask new questions

Ask bigger questions

Interact with the objects of your research in previously impossible ways

Put students and readers in the driver’s seat

This will

make my

research

better

Yes No

This will be

really cool

BUT…

Digitization (aka “Scanning”)

Transform

• Convert to digital

• Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

• Manual transcription

• Create new artifacts

Present

• Which version?

• In what format?

• To whom?

• With markup?

Preserve

• In digital form

• Is this creation?

• In analog form

Fancy scanning

Digital Humanities In Practice, “Image processing in the digital humanities”

Data Mining (aka “Distant Reading”)

Text Mining

• Word clouds

• N-grams

• Topic Modeling

• Corpus linguistics

Natural Language Processing

• Treebanking & part of-speech tagging

• Latent Semantic Analysis

• Named Entity Recognition

• Sentiment Analysis

Image analysis & processing

• Image similarity

• Text-as-images

• ….?

Word Clouds & n-grams

It's valuable to lemmatize (or stem) text for the purposes of text mining

because it provides a more consistent set of words with which to work.

This can be particularly important for languages that are under

supported in one analytical tool but well supported in another.

http://voyant-tools.org

MALLET AntConc

Topic Modeling & Corpus Linguistics

Treebanking & Part-of-Speech (PoS)

http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C08-1081

Computer Vision

Prose Poetry

https://dh101.ch/2014/10/22/images-digital-humanities-and-challenges/

Spatial Analysis (aka “Maps”)

Neogeography

• Points, lines & polygons on a map

• Minimal interaction

• Approachable tools

Georectifiedhistorical maps

• Stretch to fit lat/long

• Someday, maybe stretch lat/long to fit historical map

Humanities GIS

• More complex mapped data with

• Statistics

• Visualization

• Multiple data sets

• Cartograms

2012 U.S. Elections

Majority vote by state

Majority vote by county

Actual-vote cartogram

© 2012 M. E. J. Newman

Historical GIS

https://danieljacksonstory.cartodb.com

Network analysis (aka “Relationships”)

People and things

Words and concepts

Places and Timelines

The elements of a network

Elijah Meeks, https://dhs.stanford.edu/visualization/more-networks/

Data visualization writ large

Augmented Reality

Virtual exhibits & analysis

3D reconstructions & flyovers

Reproductions

Hammered metal with niello Laser cut acrylic with paint

The Fuller Brooch (9th c Anglo-Saxon)

The British Museum, 1952,0404.1

Nearby

colleagues

Regional

unconferences via

THATCamp.org

Your major

professional

organization

HILT

(Indianapolis) and

DHSI (Vancouver

BC)

Local community Virtual community

Twitter

DiRT

DHCommons.org

The

Programming

Historian

Collaboration and Community

Your library

Books

Franco Moretti,

Graphs, Maps,

Trees and Distant

Reading

Matthew Jockers,

Macroanalysis

Todd Presner,

David Shepard,

and Yoh Kawano,

HyperCities

Your students

(we’ll get to that)

Troubleshooting

“Digital” in your Arts & Humanities

How might your research change?

Are you struggling to find a question in a flood of documents?

Do you have a question that can’t be answered using traditional means?

Do you have an answer that needs verification on a larger scale?

Who is your public? How does they fit into this?

Can you use digital methodology to present more succinctly?

From a different, more engaging perspective?

Given your new questions, your consideration of audience, will you

create new things?

analyze existing research objects?

both?

KALANI CRAIG | @kalanicraig | www.kalanicraig.com