E.g., Cinemetrics (Frederic Brodbeck’s project for “measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual ‘fingerprint’ for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side”; includes downloadable code for Python script tools used to create the metrics)
Text Analysis
Alan’s slides on relation 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. 41-42)
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
Richard Jean So and Edwin Roland, “Race and Distant Reading” (2020) — Figure 1, p. 67.
Indeed, the goal of this essay is to begin the hard work of developing a critical version of distant reading appropriate for the analysis of race and racial discourse in literature. We envision a reflexive method that is able to identify its own elisions while also pointing to new insights and opportunities for research.(72)
Richard Jean So, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2020)
This is the main course website. There is also a course Canvas site for uploading assignments.
— (read only to end of p. 79, before the math begins)
Alan’s slides on relation 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”)
