Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss,
And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That, to the height of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
Text Analysis
Alan’s slides on relaton between text-encoding and text-anaylsis (using Yin Liu’s table of paradigms of text in “Ways of Reading, Models for Text, and the Usefulness of Dead People”)
Figure 5 (p. 14)(p. 20)Figure 15 (p. 27)Figure 18 (p. 32)Annotated quotation from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method” (2012) — (pp. 37-38)
The general methodological problem of the digital humanities can be bluntly stated: How do we get from numbers to meaning?… In our research we’ve found it useful to think about this problem through two central terms: signal and concept. We define a signal as the behavior of the feature actually being tracked and analyzed. The signal could be any number of things that are readily tracked computationally…. A concept, on the other hand, is the phenomenon that we take a signal to stand for, or the phenomenon we take the signal to reveal. It’s always the concept that really matters to us. (Postscript)
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (home screen of the online version)Marc Alexander’s tree- map visualization of present-day English in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Each dot represents a word, and the shade of the dot corresponds to when the word entered the language (darker dots show earlier words). Words are arranged by semantic proximity as indicated in the labels. (In Alan Liu, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” PMLA 128, no. 2 (2013): p. 418
General interpretive method of text analysis
Text analysis interpretive workflow
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