Tag: textual analysis

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Blog #1 – Caleb Broughton

Often times when historians are analyzing an archive, specifically one that is large in size and may take a long time to analyze fully, they run into some trouble with a term that Micki Kaufman uses in her project Quantifying Kissinger; “information overload.” This over abundance of information usually requires multiple different tools and methods for analysis, and when historians are working on this for hours at a time, the work can become tedious, frustrating, and sometime unproductive. This leads to spending more time looking at a screen and figuring out how to use certain methods and tools, rather than focusing attention on the physical archive itself.

Creating a digital artifact from archival documents gives way to so many advantages. First of all, the majority of archival documents are in rough condition, and are very fragile to the touch. If digital artifacts were not a thing, most of what we know about history from these archival documents would be unknown. Some documents are illegible to the human eye but with technology, historians are able to recreate a lot of these archival documents.

Image result for archived documents digital humanities

I think it is true that our physical and emotional relationships to our objects of study are shifting as we move deeper into a digital age. I think they are getting stronger and more intelligent, because a lot of the content that is being created connects directly to our natural human instincts, and can be very beneficial for people. As Whitley says in his paper, “Humans are quite adept at perceptual visual cues and recognizing subtle shape differences…humans are pre-wired for understanding and visualizing shape.” Because of this natural ability that humans possess, these digital tools that transform textual patterns into visual shapes naturally help people grasp certain skills of shape perception. There is even speculation that because this portion of the mind is being activated by these digital tools, it could potentially be accelerating the reading process.Image result for textarc

Whitley talks about creating these things called “concept shapes” out of texts,  to graphically represent data patterns. In order to better understand the content of a document, a group of scholars came up with a method for representing texts as “semi-spherical objects in a virtually rendered three dimensional space.” Wherever there are patterns in the text, the spherical objects “blend together to create a variety of quasi-organic shapes.” This method is one that seeks to help readers identify different patterns that would otherwise be overlooked if it was in a large body of text. For this, I believe it is true to say that digital versions of material texts highlight physical elements of texts that might otherwise pass unremarked.

One way to create online reading interfaces that can more closely approximate the experience of reading physical materials, that Whitley talks about in his paper is TextArc. It is an experiment in spatial reading, and is based off of the idea that seeing and reading are two complimentary processes. Whitley describes it basically as a “balancing act between reading and seeing.” As people are experiencing the text visualization, the eyes and the mind “scan for ideas, then follow the ideas down to where and how they appear in the text”.

 

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Blog #1

Blog #1

As our overall understanding of modern technology progresses, so does the potential of Digital Humanities. One of the main advantages of Digital Humanities is that these archival documents can be processed onto a digital library, where they can be easily accessible from all over the world. Somebody can be continents away, and still be able to read the manuscript of Jane Austen. Another major advantage of creating a digital artifact from archival documents is that finding individual words or sections is made extremely easier and more convenient.  This could help better process all of the messages that the specific author was trying to convey in his/her work or manuscript.

There are few disadvantages to creating a digital artifact from archival documents. In my opinion, the rarity of these documents that have been preserved for hundreds of years is significantly decreased when this digital transfer happens. These documents are now easily accessible, and thus lose part of their historical importance .With the digital version of the manuscript, one would be missing so much of the actual piece. Mainly, the digital transfer impedes on the aesthetic of the documents.

As I explored the Moravian Lives projects, I found it shared quite a few similarities with other large-scale DH Projects. I found out that along with these other projects, Moravian Lives heavily relies on crowdsourcing to keep it running. Many people contribute to help trace the history of the Moravian Church.

A page on the Moravian Lives website

I believe we are interacting with the textual material more on the screen than on the page. In the age of digital humanities, the physical interaction with the textual material is primarily composed of transcribing it to digital format. There are not really efficient ways to analyze the material when it is presented as one long, physical manuscript. We are interacting a lot more with the material on the screen than on paper. With all of the material digitized, it makes it easier for us to analyze the text based on word usage (find the prevalence of a specific word with respect to each author) or find a certain part of the manuscript without having to read through the entire thing first. Our research practices are changing to involve more textual analysis than anything, and this allows us to make useful diagrams such as word maps or frequency charts.

Open-source and free digitized materials offer unbounded pedagogical opportunities. After doing a little bit of research, I found a website called DIRT, which is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. It provided an extensive list of downloadable programs for about forty or so different digital research techniques that could range from analyzing data relationships to even transcribing manuscripts!. DIRT is a public domain website, so student are able to use this for all of their digital humanities needs.The opportunities are seemingly endless in that there are so many different sources. For example, when I clicked “analysis”, there were at least one hundred different websites or programs that were provided. According to Whitley, this allows for “distant reading”. The data can be analyzed better because more connections are being established.

DIRT provides a great amount of resources to aid analysis

I believe that instead of supplanting our need to view the physical originals, digitized materials enhance the necessity and desire for archival work. Whitley explained how digital tools can help create more questions, which could result in a more complex look into the data. The realm of humanities has never been more excited than in this digital era. With digital humanities, we can now process manuscripts and data with more efficiency than we ever have in all humanity. This makes the necessity of archival work at an all time peak, because we have gained the ability to ubiquitously transcribe and analyze documents that were previously untouched and unmarked. The significance of humanities right now is at an all time high, and the more crowdsourcing we can get working on it, the more we’ll really be able to analyze all those who came before us!

 

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Practice Blog

Practice 8/28 – Tyler George

My first digital humanities approach I chose to look at is mapping, by observing the Map of Early Modern London (https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/agas.htm) page created by many members, who were lead by Janelle Jenstad, Martin Holmes, and Mark Kaethler. This map is designed to streamline the information found in encyclopedia, library, and stow editions all into one place with an easy user interface. Primarily this map is an example of textual analysis, by bringing hundreds of texts together to provide the viewer a streamlined overview of each particular area, while also providing the information to dig deeper into their research should they choose. The map is also an example of visualization, while also preserving and analyzing the areas of historical London. This is a great way to do this because maps provide a much more clear representation of what London actually looked like than you would ever find in a typical textbook. This interface allows us to visualize great amount of historical information in an accessible way. Easy to use, this map allows me to zoom in on a location, click on it and provides vast information on that location. Additionally, you can sort by category and pull up any locations relating to that category with ease. This map revolutionizes the way users view maps and find certain things in London. Not only does it show me the location of each place, it provides historical context as well as hundreds of articles about each place. This is easily the best interface for viewing a map, as it is easy to search for or find new places, and provides more information on each place than possible to find anywhere else. Lastly, this map is able to include where each piece of information came from, making it easy to verify the authenticity of their information.

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Another interesting website I viewed is titled Selfie City (http://selfiecity.net/#) coordinated by Dr. Lev Manovich, by there help of several contributors. This site provides image plots trying to categorize the commonalities of selfies in particular areas. This is a clear example of visualization, define by Johanna Drucker as “a methodological reversal which makes visualization a procedure rather than a product and integrates interpretation into digitalization in a concrete way”  (Whitley reading). This site uses image analysis to relate themes between selfies, for example the tilt of photos, use of glasses, age, gender, etc. There is definitely no better way to find information regarding selfies by region than through their technology used that closely examines each image. One interesting stat found was that Sao Paulo females tilt there head on average 17 degrees in their selfies compared to Moscow males who average a 7 degree tilt. This is a very interesting stat that I would never have previously thought possible without the use of this technology. Their automated analysis of images allowed them to recognize just the smallest details that would’ve taken forever to browse through so many photos with just the human eye. When examining photos, this is truly a remarkable discovery that will revolutionize the way we study images.

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Practice Blog

Practice Blog – Caleb Broughton

The first project that I chose to use is a tool called Poemage, which was created by a team of four scholars at the University of Utah in 2016. Nina McCurdy, Julie Lein, Katharine Coles, and Miriah Meyer created this visualization system in order to explore the sonic topology of a poem. The primary DH focus of this project is visualization, with a secondary focus on textual analysis. The program Poemage has the capability of recognizing all of the different complex structures and patterns of words in any given poem. It also has the ability to recognize every other poem in the database that contains similar word structures and patterns to the poem, in order to group a large number of poems together to compare and contrast them. The textual analysis that is done through Poemage helps give readers a more clear and concise visualization of the poems they want to see.

The second project that I chose to write about is Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition. I chose this one in particular because of how it relates to what we are going to be doing in this class. The primary DH focus of this project is preservation and archiving, with a secondary focus on digital edition. Many of these original manuscripts are frail and very delicate, which has made it nearly impossible for a long time to locate and conserve these manuscripts. This digital reunification however, has made it possible to access and read these newly digitized versions of the original manuscripts, as well as view high quality images of the actual original manuscripts of Jane Austen. This digital edition of Jane Austen’s personal manuscripts, is a perfect demonstration of how these papers which are frail and shouldn’t be handled unless necessary, can be virtually reunified and conserved in history.