the scottbot irregular on Scott B. Weingart

The Index of Digital Humanities Conferences

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Check out The Index of Digital Humanities Conferences, the largest extant collection of DH conference metadata.

The Data

The Index focuses on the flagship ADHO conference, but encompasses other events as well. As of this release, it indexes 489 conferences from 39 countries dating back to 1960. We entered individual work metadata for 59 of those conferences, including titles, keywords, authorships, institutional affiliations, and so on. In all, there are 7,082 conference presentations by 8,392 authors, hailing from 1,830 institutions and 86 countries.

Seeking New Physics

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Yesterday, OpenAI announced the results of a new experiment.¹ AIs evolved to use tools to play hide-and-seek. More interestingly, they learned to exploit errors from the in-game physics engine to “cheat”, breaking physics to find their opponents.

Unexpected and surprising behaviors included box surfing, where seekers learn to bring a box to a locked ramp in order to jump on top of the box and then “surf” it to the hider’s shelter. pic.twitter.com/v0kGfCYZna

Modeling Space Ships from Ocean Liners

Mon, 16 Sep 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Caveats

I love books, and libraries. In graduate school, most of my friends were studying to be librarians. A university library now partially pays my salary. Still, I don’t know much about them, being first and foremost a historian who uses computers. A lot of smart people have written a lot of smart things about libraries that I wish I’ve read, or even know about, but I’m still working on that one.

The Route of a Text Message

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500

[Note: Find the more polished, professionally illustrated version of this piece at Motherboard|Vice!]

This is the third post in my full-stack dev (f-s d) series on the secret life of data. This installment is about a single text message: how it was typed, stored, sent, received, and displayed. I sprinkle in some history and context to break up the alphabet soup of protocols, but though the piece gets technical, it should all be easily understood.

The Center for Midnight

Sun, 04 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0400

How many people do you need? Is an artistic movement only a movement as a collective? Can one person alone carry the melody?

Over the course of 12 hours between October 29th and October 31st, a pop-up writing collective of artists, scholars, and algorithms uncovered a fragmentary history of the Center for Midnight, an imagined artistic movement of the late twentieth century.

Encouraging Misfits

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0400

tl;dr Academics’ individual policing of disciplinary boundaries at the expense of intellectual merit does a disservice to our global research community, which is already structured to reinforce disciplinarity at every stage. We should work harder to encourage research misfits to offset this structural pull.

The academic game is stacked to reinforce old community practices. PhDs aren’t only about specialization, but about teaching you to think, act, write, and cite like the discipline you’ll soon join. Tenure is about proving to your peers you are like them. Publishing and winning grants are as much about goodness of fit as about quality of work.

Argument Clinic

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Like what’s your secret for taking historical evidence and understanding how calculating std or mse or kde means something?????

— Zoe LeBlanc (@Zoe_LeBlanc) July 25, 2017

Zoe LeBlanc asked how basic statistics lead to a meaningful historical argument. A good discussion followed, worth reading, but since I couldn’t fit my response into tweets, I hoped to add a bit to the thread here on the irregular. I’m addressing only one tiny corner of her question, in a way that is peculiar to my own still-forming approach to computational history; I hope it will be of some use to those starting out.

Teaching Yourself to Code in DH

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500

tl;dr Book-length introductions to programming or analytic methods (math / statistics / etc.) aimed at or useful for humanists with limited coding experience.

What am I missing from this list of systematic (book-length) introductions to analytic programming in DH? Please add https://t.co/tWjtb54q4T

— Scott B. Weingart ? (@scott_bot) February 17, 2017

I’m collecting programming & methodological textbooks for humanists as part of a reflective study on DH, but figured it’d also be useful for those interested in teaching themselves to code, or teachers who need a textbook for their class. Though I haven’t read them all yet, I’ve organized them into very imperfect categories and provided (hopefully) some useful comments. Short coding exercises, books that assume some pre-existing knowledge of coding, and theoretical introductions are not listed here.

Submissions to DH2017 (pt. 1)

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Like many times before, I’m analyzing the international digital humanities conference, this time the 2017 conference in Montréal. The data I collect is available to any conference peer reviewer, though I do a bunch of scraping, cleaning, scrubbing, shampooing, anonymizing, etc. before posting these results.

This first post covers the basic landscape of submissions to next year’s conference: how many submissions there are, what they’re about, and so forth.

The analysis is opinionated and sprinkled with my own preliminary interpretations. If you disagree with something or want to see more, comment below, and I’ll try to address it in the inevitable follow-up. If you want the data, too bad—since it’s only available to reviewers, there’s an expectation of privacy. If you are sad for political or other reasons and live near me, I will bring you chocolate; if you are sad and do not live near me, you should move to Pittsburgh. We have chocolate.

Lessons From Digital History’s Antecedents

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0400

The below is the transcript from my October 29 keynote presented to the Creativity and The City 1600-2000 conference in Amsterdam, titled “Punched-Card Humanities”. I survey historical approaches to quantitative history, how they relate to the nomothetic/idiographic divide, and discuss some lessons we can learn from past successes and failures. For ≈200 relevant references, see this Zotero folder.

[f-s d] Cetus

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Quoting Liz Losh, Jacqueline Wernimont tweeted that behind every visualization is a spreadsheet.

@lizlosh “behind every visualization…shhhh…is a spreadsheet” #femdh #dhsi2016

— Jacqueline Wernimont (@profwernimont) June 14, 2016

But what, I wondered, is behind every spreadsheet?

But what’s behind every spreadsheet? [cue theme for “Full-Stack Dev”, hot new NPR series on the secret life of data] https://t.co/2HCLtySIwL

— Scott B. Weingart (@scott_bot) June 14, 2016

Space whales.

Okay, maybe space whales aren’t behind every spreadsheet, but they’re behind this one, dated 1662, notable for the gigantic nail it hammered into the coffin of our belief that heaven above is perfect and unchanging. The following post is the first in my new series full-stack dev (f-s d), where I explore the secret life of data.¹

Experience

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Last week, I publicly outed myself as a non-tenure-track academic diagnosed on the autism spectrum,¹ hoping that doing so might help other struggling academics find solace knowing they are not alone. I was unprepared for the outpouring of private and public support. Friends, colleagues, and strangers thanked me for helping them feel a little less alone, which in turn helped me feel much less alone. Thank you all, deeply and sincerely.

In a similar spirit, for interested allies and struggling fellows, this post is about how my symptoms manifest in the academic world, and how I manage them.²

An autistic academic explores the stigma of mental-health issues (essay)

Fri, 27 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Once or twice a year, my parents and I huddled into my little windowless bathroom. Our ears were glued to the radio as we attempted to calm a terrified golden retriever and waited for the hurricane to pass. While our dog never liked it, I always appreciated the safety that the room provided. In fact, I would often lock myself in the bathroom after school, sitting on the covered toilet with the lights off and a towel bunched against the door, blocking light and sound from the rest of the house. The best moments were those nights in that bathroom when it got so dark my eyes never adjusted, so quiet that it seemed I could hear my own heartbeat.

“Digital History” Can Never Be New

Mon, 02 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400

If you claim computational approaches to history (“digital history”) lets historians ask new types of questions, or that they oﬀer new historical approaches to answering or exploring old questions, you are wrong. You’re not actually wrong, but you are institutionally wrong, which is maybe worse.

This is a problem, because rhetoric from practitioners (including me) is that we can bring some “new” to the table, and when we don’t, we’re called out for not doing so. The exchange might (but probably won’t) go like this:

The Turing Point

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Below is some crazy, uninformed ramblings about the least-complex possible way to trick someone into thinking a computer is a human, for the purpose of history research. I’d love some genuine AI/Machine Intelligence researchers to point me to the actual discussions on the subject. These aren’t original thoughts; they spring from countless sci-fi novels and AI research from the ’70s-’90s. Humanists beware: this is super sci-fi speculative, but maybe an interesting thought experiment.

Summary: Martin & Runyon’s “Digital Humanities, Digital Hegemony”

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Today’s post just summarizes an article recently shared with me, as an attempt to boost the signal:

@scott_bot @NickoalEichmann @foxyfolklorist We published the prelim findings here: https://t.co/HQk59d9xMs

— John D. Martin III (@jdmar3) April 4, 2016

Those following along at home know I’ve been exploring how digital humanities infrastructure reinforces pre-existing cultural biases, most recently with Nickoal Eichmann & Jeana Jorgensen looking at DH Conferences, 2000-2015.

One limitation of our study is we know very little about the content of conference presentations or the racial identities of authors, which means we can’t assess bias in those directions. John D. Martin III & Carolyn Runyon recently published preliminary results more thoroughly addressing race & gender in DH from a funding perspective, and focused on the content of grants:

Who sits in the 41st chair?

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0400

By scott b. weingart · 2016-03-25

tl;dr Rich- get-richer academic prestige in a scarce job market makes meritocracy impossible. Why some things get popular and others don’t. Also agent-based simulations.

Slightly longer tl;dr This post is about why academia isn’t a meritocracy, at no intentional fault of those in power who try to make it one. None of presented ideas are novel on their own, but I do intend this as a novel conceptual contribution in its connection of disparate threads. Especially, I suggest the predictability of research success in a scarce academic economy as a theoretical framework for exploring successes and failures in the history of science.

Acceptances to DH2016 (pt. 1)

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0400

[note: originally published as draft on March 17th, 2016]

DH2016 announced their final(ish) program yesterday and, of course, that means it’s analysis time. Every year, I ~~steal~~ scrape submission data from the reviewer interface, and then scrape the final conference program, to report acceptance rates and basic stats for the annual event. See my previous 7.2 million previous posts on the subject. Nobody gives me data, I take it (capta, amiright?), so take these results with as many grains of salt as you’ll find at the DH2016 salt mines.

Representation at Digital Humanities Conferences (2000-2015)

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Nickoal Eichmann (corresponding author), Jeana Jorgensen, Scott B. Weingart¹

NOTE: This is a pre-peer reviewed draft submitted for publication in Feminist Debates in Digital Humanities, eds. Jacque Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh, University of Minnesota Press (2017). Comments are welcome, and a downloadable dataset / more figures are forthcoming. This chapter will be released alongside another on the history of DH conferences, co-authored by Weingart & Eichmann (forthcoming), which will go into further detail on technical aspects of this study, including the data collection & statistics. Many of the materials first appeared on this blog. To cite this preprint, use the figshare DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3120610.v1

Gender Inclusivity in Six Degrees

Tue, 05 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Computational methods are great at bringing voice to the historically marginalized (see Michelle Moravec or Elaine Parsons). We may never learn much about specific actors who produced few written records compared to their affluent white male counterparts, but by collecting the underrepresented together, we can hear in aggregate what’s often too quiet to discern individually.

This reconstruction is never easy, and rarely sensitive. Categorizing people dehumanizes the humanities, and when we increase the volume, we lose the nuance. We also constantly battle what computer scientists call GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out); analysis is only as good as the underlying data. At Six Degrees, we want our network to represent and reinforce the full diversity of early modern social ties, but a combination of historical scarcity and editorial decisions in our sources prevents the network from living up to this potential. In many ways, this mirrors the period itself: more open and egalitarian in ideal than reality. We can do something about that, but first we have to notice what’s missing.

Submissions to DH2016 (pt. 1)

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0500

tl;dr Basic numbers on DH2016 submissions.

Twice a year I indulge my meta-disciplinary sweet tooth: once to look at who’s submitting what to ADHO’s annual digital humanities conference, and once to look at which pieces get accepted (see the rest of the series). This post presents my first look at DH2016 conference submissions, the data for which I scraped from ConfTool during the open peer review bidding phase. Open peer review bidding began in 2013, so I have 4 years of data. I opt not to publish this data, as most authors submit pieces under an expectation of privacy, and might violently throw things at my face if people find out which submissions weren’t accepted. Also ethics.

Ghosts in the Machine

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Musings on materiality and cost after a tour of The Shoah Foundation.

Forgetting The Holocaust

As the only historian in my immediate family, I’m responsible for our genealogy, saved in a massive GEDCOM file. Through the wonders of the web, I now manage quite the sprawling tree: over 100,000 people, hundreds of photos, thousands of census records & historical documents. The majority came from distant relations managing their own trees, with whom I share.

What’s Counted Counts

Fri, 31 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

tl;dr. Don’t rely on data to fix the world’s injustices. An unusually self-reflective and self-indulgent post.

[Edit: this question was prompted by a series of analyses and visualizations I’ve done in collaboration with Nickoal Eichmann, but I purposefully left her out of the majority of this post, as it was one of self-reflection about my own personal choices. A respected colleague pointed out in private that by doing so, I nullified my female collaborator’s contributions to the project, for which I apologize deeply. Nickoal’s input has been integral to all of this, and she and many others, including particularly Jeana Jorgensen and Heather Froehlich (who has written on this very subject), have played vital roles in my own learning about these issues. Recent provocations by Miriam Posner helped solidify a lot of these thoughts and inspired this post. What follows is a self-exploration, recapping what many people have already said, but hopefully still useful to some. Mistakes below shouldn’t reflect poorly on those who influenced or inspired me. The post from this point on is as it originally appeared.]

Down the Rabbit Hole

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

WHEREIN I get angry at the internet and yell at it to get off my lawn.

You know what’s cool? Ryan Cordell and friends’ Viral Texts project. It tracks how 19th-century U.S. newspapers used to copy texts from each other, little snippets of news or information, and republish them in their own publications. A single snippet of text could wind its way all across the country, sometimes changing a bit like a game of telephone, rarely-if-ever naming the original author.

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2015 (part 4)

Sun, 28 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

tl;dr

Women are (nearly but not quite) as likely as men to be accepted by peer reviewers at DH conferences, but names foreign to the US are less likely than either men or women to be accepted to these conferences. Some topics are more likely to be written on by women (gender, culture, teaching DH, creative arts & art history, GLAM, institutions), and others more likely to be discussed by men (standards, archaeology, stylometry, programming/software).

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2015 (part 3)

Sat, 27 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

tl;dr

There’s a disparity between gender diversity in authorship and attendance at DH2015; attendees are diverse, authors aren’t. That said, the geography of attendance is actually pretty encouraging this year. A lot of this work draws a project on the history of DH conferences I’m undertaking with the inimitable Nickoal Eichmann. She’s been integral on the research of everything you read about conferences pre-2013.

Diversity at DH2015: Preliminary Numbers

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2015 (part 2)

Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Had enough yet? Too bad! Full-ahead into my analysis of DH2015, part of my 6,021-part series on DH conference submissions and acceptances. If you want more context, read the Acceptances to DH2015 part 1.

tl;dr

This post’s about the topical coverage of DH2015 in Australia. If you’re curious about how the landscape compares to previous years, see this post. You’ll see a lot of text, literature, and visualizations this year, as well as archives and digitisation projects. You won’t see a lot of presentations in other languages, or presentations focused on non-text sources. Gender studies is pretty much nonexistent. If you want to get accepted, submit pieces about visualization, text/data, literature, or archives. If you want to get rejected, submit pieces about pedagogy, games, knowledge representation, anthropology, or cultural studies.

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2015 (part 1)

Wed, 24 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

tl;dr

Part 1 is about sheer numbers of acceptances to DH2015 and comparisons with previous years. DH is still growing, but the conference locale likely prohibited a larger conference this year than last. Acceptance rates are higher this year than previous years. Long papers still reign supreme. Papers with more authors are more likely to be accepted.

Introduction

It’s that time of the year again, when all the good little boys, girls, and other genders of DH gather around the scottbot irregular in ~~pointless meta-analysis~~ quiet self-reflection. As most of you know, the 2015 Digital Humanities conference occurs next week in Sydney, Australia. They’ve just released the final program, full of pretty exciting work, which means I can compare it to my analysis of submissions to DH2015 (1, 2, & 3) to see how DH is changing, how work gets accepted or rejected, etc. This is part of my series on analyzing DH conferences.

Not Enough Perspectives, Pt. 1

Sun, 29 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Right now DH is all texts, but not enough perspectives. -Andrew Piper

Summary: Digital Humanities suffers from a lack of perspectives in two ways: we need to focus more on the perspectives of those who interact with the cultural objects we study, and we need more outside academic perspectives. In Part 1, I cover Russian Formalism, questions of validity, and what perspective we bring to our studies. In Part 2,¹ I call for pulling inspiration from even more disciplines, and for the adoption and exploration of three new-to-DH concepts: Appreciability, Agreement, and Appropriateness. These three terms will help tease apart competing notions of validity.

Culturomics 2: The Search for More Money

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0500

“God willing, we’ll all meet again in Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.” -Mel Brooks, Spaceballs, 1987

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (2012 CE, Indiana), I wrote a few blog posts explaining that, when writing history, it might be good to talk to historians (1,2,3). They were popular posts for the Irregular, and inspired by Mel Brooks’ recent interest in making Spaceballs 2, I figured it was time for a sequel of my own. You know, for all the money this blog pulls in.¹

Networks Demystified 9: Bimodal Networks

Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

What do you think, is a year long enough to wait between Networks Demystified posts? I don’t think so, which is why it’s been a year and a month. Welcome back! A recent twitter back-and-forth culminated in a request for a discussion of “bimodal networks”, and my Networks Demystified series seemed like a perfect place for just such a discussion.

@scott_bot what I need, I think, is a discussion of network metrics from a bimodal perspective.

Digital History, Saturn’s Rings, and the Battle of Trafalgar

Mon, 15 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0500

History and astronomy are a lot alike. When people claim history couldn’t possibly be scientific, because how can you do science without direct experimentation, astronomy should be used as an immediate counterexample.

Astronomers and historians both view their subjects from great distances; too far to send instruments for direct measurement and experimentation. Things have changed a bit in the last century for astronomy, of course, with the advent of machines sensitive enough to create earth-based astronomical experiments. We’ve also built ships to take us to the farthest reaches, for more direct observations.

Submissions to Digital Humanities 2015 (pt. 3)

Fri, 07 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0500

This is the third post in a three-part series analyzing submissions to the 2015 Digital Humanities conference in Australia. In parts 1 & 2, I covered submission volumes, topical coverage, and comparisons to conferences in previous years. This post will briefly address the geography of submissions, further exploring my criticism that this global-themed conference doesn’t feel so global after all. My geographic analysis shows the conference to be more international than I originally suspected.

Submissions to Digital Humanities 2015 (pt. 1)

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0500

It’s that time of the year again! The 2015 Digital Humanities conference will take place next summer in Australia, and as per usual, I’m going to summarize what is being submitted to the conference and, eventually, how those submissions become accepted. Each year reviewers get the chance to “bid” on conference submissions, and this lets us get a peak inside the general trends in DH research. This post (pt. 1) will focus solely on this year’s submissions, and next post will compare them to previous years and locations.

Submissions to Digital Humanities 2015 (pt. 2)

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0500

Do you like the digital humanities? Me too! You better like it, because this is the 700th or so in a series of posts about our annual conference, and I can’t imagine why else you’d be reading it.

My last post went into some summary statistics of submissions to DH2015, concluding in the end that this upcoming conference, the first outside the Northern Hemisphere, with the theme “Global Digital Humanities”, is surprisingly similar to the DH we’ve seen before. This post will compare this year to submissions to the previous two conferences, in Switzerland and the Nebraska. Part 3 will go into some more detail of geography and globalizing trends.

The moral role of DH in a data-driven world

Sun, 14 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400

This is the transcript from my closing keynote address at the 2014 DH Forum in Lawrence, Kansas. It’s the result of my conflicted feelings on the recent Facebook emotional contagion controversy, and despite my earlier tweets, I conclude the study was important and valuable specifically because it was so controversial.

For the non-Digital-Humanities (DH) crowd, a quick glossary. Distant Reading is our new term for reading lots of books at once using computational assistance; Close Reading is the traditional term for reading one thing extremely minutely, exhaustively.

[Review] The Book of Trees, Manuel Lima

Sat, 12 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0400

The first line on the first page of The Book of Trees is “This is the book I wish had been available when I was researching my previous book, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information.” It’s funny, because this is also the book I wish had been available when I was researching my own project, Knowledge Uprooted. It took Alberto Cairo, reading over a draft of my article, to point out that Manuel Lima was working on a book-length version of a very similar project. If the book had come out a year ago, my own research might look very different. Lima’s book is beautifully designed, well-researched, and a delightful resource for anyone interested in visualizations of knowledge.

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2014 (part 1)

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0400

It’s that time again! The annual Digital Humanities conference schedule has been released, and this time it’s in Switzerland. In an effort to console myself from not having the funding to make it this year, I’ve gone ahead and analyzed the nitty-gritty of acceptances and rejections to the conference. For those interested in this sort of analysis, you can find my take on submissions to DH2013, acceptances at DH2013, and submissions to DH2014. If you’re visiting this page from the future, you can find any future DH conference analyses at this tag link.

Barriers to Scholarship & Iterative Writing

Sun, 09 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0500

This post is mostly just thinking out loud, musing about two related barriers to scholarship: a stigma related to self-plagiarism, and various copyright concerns. It includes a potential way to get past them.

Self-Plagiarism

When Jonah Lehrer’s plagiarism scandal first broke, it sounded a bit silly. Lehrer, it turned out, had taken some sentences he’d used in earlier articles, and reused them in a few New Yorker blog posts. Without citing himself. Oh no, I thought. Surely, this represents the height of modern journalistic moral depravity.

Understanding Special Relativity through History and Triangles (pt. 1)

Sun, 23 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

We interrupt this usually-DH blog because I got in a discussion about Special Relativity with a friend, and promised it was easily understood using only the math we use for triangles. But I’m a historian, so I can’t leave a good description alone without some background.

Do historians need scientists?

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

[edit: I’m realizing I didn’t make it clear in this post that I’m aware many historians consider themselves scientists, and that there’s plenty of scientific historical archaeology and anthropology. That’s exactly what I’m advocating there be more of, and more varied.] Short Answer: Yes.

Less Snarky Answer: Historians need to be flexible to fresh methods, fresh perspectives, and fresh blood. Maybe not that last one, I guess, as it might invite vampires.Okay, I suppose this answer wasn’t actually less snarky.

Appreciability & Experimental Digital Humanities

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

Operationalize: to express or define (something) in terms of the operations used to determine or prove it.

Precision deceives. Quantification projects an illusion of certainty and solidity no matter the provenance of the underlying data. It is a black box, through which uncertain estimations become sterile observations. The process involves several steps: a cookie cutter to make sure the data are all shaped the same way, an equation to aggregate the inherently unique, a visualization to display exact values from a process that was anything but.

Bridging Token and Type

Sat, 18 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

There’s an oft-spoken and somewhat strawman tale of how the digital humanities is bridging C.P. Snow’s “Two Culture” divide, between the sciences and the humanities. This story is sometimes true (it’s fun putting together Ocean’s Eleven-esque teams comprising every discipline needed to get the job done) and sometimes false (plenty of people on either side still view the other with skepticism), but as a historian of science, I don’t find the divide all that interesting. As Snow’s title suggests, this divide is first and foremost cultural. There’s another overlapping divide, a bit more epistemological, methodological, and ontological, which I’ll explore here. It’s the nomothetic(type)/idiographic(token) divide, and I’ll argue here that not only are its barriers falling, but also that the distinction itself is becoming less relevant.

A Working Definition of Digital Humanites

Sun, 08 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Hah! I tricked you. I don’t intend to define digital humanities here—too much blood has already been spilled over that subject. I’m sure we all remember the terrible digital humanities / humanities computing wars of 2004, now commemorated yearly under a Big Tent in the U.S., Europe, or in 2015, Australia. Most of us still suffer from ACH or ~~ALLC~~ (edit: I’ve been reminded the more politically correct acronym these days is EADH).

Networks Demystified 8: When Networks are Inappropriate

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0500

A few hundred years ago, I promised to talk about when not to use networks, or when networks are used improperly. With The Historian’s Macroscope in the works, I’ve decided to finally start answering that question, and this Networks Demystified is my first attempt at doing so. If you’re new here, this is part of an annoyingly long series (1 network basics, 2 degree, 3 power laws, 4 co-citation analysis, 5 communities and PageRank, 6 this space left intentionally blank, 7 co-citation analysis II). I’ve issued a lot of vague words of caution without doing a great job of explaining them, so here is the first substantive part of that explanation.

Submissions to Digital Humanities 2014

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Submissions for the 2014 Digital Humanities conference just closed. It’ll be in Switzerland this time around, which unfortunately means I won’t be able make it, but I’ll be eagerly following along from afar. Like last year, reviewers are allowed to preview the submitted abstracts. Also like last year, I’m going to be a reviewer, which means I’ll have the opportunity to revisit the submissions to DH2013 to see how the submissions differed this time around. No doubt when the reviews are in and the accepted articles are revealed, I’ll also revisit my analysis of DH conference acceptances.

Historians, Doctors, and their Absence

Sun, 20 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0400

[Note: sorry for the lack of polish on the post compared to others. This was hastily written before a day of international travel. Take it with however many grains of salt seem appropriate under the circumstances.]

[Author’s note two: Whoops! Never included the link to the article. Here it is.]

Every once in a while, ¹ a group of exceedingly clever mathematicians and physicists decide to do something exceedingly clever on something that has nothing to do with math or physics. This particular research project has to do with the 14th Century Black Death, resulting in such claims as the small-world network effect is a completely modern phenomenon, and “most social exchange among humans before the modern era took place via face-to-face interaction.”

Networks Demystified 7: Doing Co-Citation Analyses

Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0400

So this is awkward. I’ve published Networks Demystified 7: Doing Citation Analyses before Networks Demystified 6: Organizing Your Twitter Lists. What depraved lunatic would do such a thing? The kind of depraved lunatic that is teaching this very subject twice in the next two weeks: deal with it, you’ll get your twitterstructions soon, internet. In the meantime, enjoy the irregular nature of the scottbot irregular.

And this is part 7 of my increasingly inaccurately named trilogy of instructional network analysis posts (1 network basics, 2 degree, 3 power laws, 4 co-citation analysis, 5 communities and PageRank, 6 this space left intentionally blank). I’m covering how to actually do citation analyses, so it’s a continuation of part 4 of the series. If you want to know what citation analysis is and why to do it, as well as a laundry list of previous examples in the humanities and social sciences, go read that post. If you want to just finally be able to analyze citations, like you’ve always dreamed, read on. ¹

Networks Demystified 5: Communities, PageRank, and Sampling Caveats

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The fifth and sixth (coming soon…) installment of Networks Demystified will be a bit more applied than the previous bunch (1 network basics, 2 degree, 3 power laws, 4 co-citation analysis). Like many of my recent posts, this one is in response to a Twitter conversation:

Some day, I need to go back through my lists of ppl I follow and organize them better.

Breaking the Ph.D. model using pretty pictures

Tue, 03 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Earlier today, Heather Froehlich shared what’s at this point become a canonical illustration among Ph.D. students: “The Illustrated guide to a Ph.D.” The illustrator, Matt Might, describes the sum of human knowledge as a circle. As a child, you sit at the center of the circle, looking out in all directions.

Eventually, he describes, you get various layers of education, until by the end of your bachelor’s degree you’ve begun focusing on a specialty, focusing knowledge in one direction.

Improving the Journal of Digital Humanities

Fri, 30 Aug 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Twitter and the digital humanities blogosphere has been abuzz recently over an ill-fated special issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities (JDH) on Postcolonial Digital Humanities. I won’t get too much into what happened and why, not because I don’t think it’s important, but because I respect both parties too much and feel I am too close to the story to provide an unbiased opinion. Summarizing, the guest editors felt they were treated poorly, in part because of the nature of their content, and in part because of the way the JDH handles its publications.

From Trees to Webs: Uprooting Knowledge through Visualization

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The blog’s been quiet lately; my attention has been occupied by various journal submissions and a new book in the works, but I figured my readers would be interested in one of those forthcoming publications. This is an article [preprint] I’m presenting at the Universal Decimal Classification Seminar in The Hague this October, on the history of how we’ve illustrated the interconnections of knowledge and scholarly domains. It’s basically two stories: one of how we shifted from understanding the world hierarchically to understanding it as a flat web of interconnected parts, and the other of how the thing itself and knowledge of that thing became separated.

The Historian’s Macroscope

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Whelp, it appears the cat’s out of the bag. Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, and I have signed our ICP contract and will shortly begin the process of writing The Historian’s Macroscope, a book introducing the process and rationale of digital history to a broad audience. The book will be a further experiment in live-writing: as we have drafts of the text, they will go online immediately for comments and feedback. The publishers have graciously agreed to allow us to keep the live-written portion online after the book goes on sale, and though what remains online will not be the final copy-edited and typeset version, we (both authors and publishers) feel this is a good compromise to prevent the cannibalization of book sales while still keeping much of the content open and available for those who cannot afford the book or are looking for a taste before they purchase it. Thankfully, this plan also fits well with my various pledges to help make a more open scholarly world.

An experiment in communal editing: Finding the history & philosophy of science.

Sat, 06 Jul 2013 00:00:00 -0400

After my last post about co-citation analysis, the author of one of the papers I was responding to, K. Brad Wray, generously commented and suggested I write up and publish the results and send them off to Erkenntnis, which is the same journal he published his results. That sounded like a great idea, so I am.

Because so many good ideas have come from comments on this blog, I’d like to try opening my first draft to communal commenting. For those who aren’t familiar with google docs (anyone? Bueller?), you can comment by selecting test and either hitting ctrl-alt-m, or going to the insert-> menu and clicking ‘Comment’.

Networks Demystified 4: Co-Citation Analysis

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Figure 6: Author co-citation network of 15 history & philosophy of science journals. Two authors are connected if they are cited together in some article, and connected more strongly if they are cited together frequently. Click to enlarge. [via me!]

This installment of Networks Demystified is the first one that’s actually applied. A few days ago, a discussion arose over twitter involving citation networks, and this post fills the dual purpose of continuing that discussion, and teaching a bit about basic citation analysis. If you’re looking for the very basics of networks, see part 1 and part 2. Part 3 is a warning for anyone who feels the urge to say “power law.” To recap: nodes are the dots/points in the network, edges are the lines/arrows/connections.

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2013 (part 1)

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The 2013 Digital Humanities conference in Nebraska just released its program with a list of papers and participants. As some readers may recall, when the initial round of reviews went out for the conference, I tried my hand at analyzing submissions to DH2013. Now that the schedule has been released, the data available puts us in a unique position to compare proposed against accepted submissions, thus potentially revealing how what research is being done compares with what research the DH community (through reviews) finds good or interesting. In my last post, I showed that literary studies and data/text mining submissions were at the top of the list; only half as many studies were historical rather than literary. Archive work and visualizations were also near the top of the list, above multimedia, web, and content analyses, though each of those were high as well. A keyword analysis showed that while Visualization wasn’t necessarily at the top of the list, it was the most central concept connecting the rest of the conference together. Nobody knows (and few care) what DH really means; however, these analyses present the factors that bind together those who call themselves digital humanists and submit to its main conference. The post below explores to what extent submissions and acceptances align. I preserve anonymity wherever possible, as submitting authors did not do so with the expectation that turned down submission data would be public.

Friends don't let friends calculate p-values (without fully understanding them)

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I wrote this in 2012 in response to a twitter conversation with Mike Taylor, who was patient enough to read a draft of this post in late November and point out all the various ways it could be changed and improved. No doubt if I had taken the time to take his advice and change the post accordingly, this post would be a beautiful thing and well-worth reading. I’d like to thank him for his patient comments, and apologize for not acting on them, as I don’t foresee being able to take the time in the near future to get back to this post. I don’t really like seeing a post sit in my draft folder for months, so I’ll release it out to the world as naked and ugly as the day it was born, with the hopes that I’ll eventually sit down and write a better one that takes all of Mike’s wonderful suggestions into account. Also, John Kruschke apparently published a paper with a similar title; as it’s a paper I’ve read before but forgot about, I’m guessing I inadvertently stole his fantastic phrase. Apologies to John!

On MOOCs

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Nobody has said so to my face, but sometimes I’m scared that some of my readers secretly think I’m single-handedly assisting in the downfall of academia as we know it. You see, I was the associate instructor of an information visualization MOOC this past semester, and next Spring I’ll be putting together my own MOOC on information visualization for the digital humanities. It’s an odd position to be in, when much of the anti-DH rhetoric is against MOOCs while so few DHers actually support them (and it seems most vehemently denounce them). I’ve occasionally wondered if I’m the mostly-fictional strawman the anti-DH crowd is actually railing against. I don’t think I am, and I think it’s well-past time I posted my rationale of why.

Liveblogged Review of Macroanalysis by Matthew L. Jockers, Part 2

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I just got Matthew L. Jocker’s Macroanalysis in the mail, and I’m excited enough about it to liveblog my review. Here’s the review of part II (Analysis), chapter 5 (metadata). Read Part 1, Part 3, …

Part II: Analysis

Part II of Macroanalysis moves from framing the discussion to presenting a series of case studies around a theme, starting fairly simply in claims and types of analyses and moving into the complex. This section takes up 130 of the 200 pages; in a discipline (or whatever DH is) which has coasted too long on claims that the proof of its utility will be in the pudding (eventually), it’s refreshing to see a book that is at least 65% pudding. That said, with so much substance – particularly with so much new substance – Jockers opens his arguments up for specific critiques.

Liveblogged Review of Macroanalysis by Matthew L. Jockers, Part 1

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I just got Matthew L. Jocker’s Macroanalysis in the mail, and I’m excited enough about it to liveblog my review. Here’s my review of part I (Foundation), all chapters. Read Part 2, Part 3, …

Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History is a book whose time has come. “Individual creativity,” Matthew L. Jockers writes, “is highly constrained, even determined, by factors outside of what we consider to be a writer’s conscious control.” Although Jockers’ book is a work of impressive creativity, it also fits squarely within a larger set of trends. The scents of ‘Digital Humanities’ (DH) and ‘Big Data’ are in the air, the funding-rich smells attracting predators from all corners, and Jockers’ book floats somewhere in the center of it all. As with many DH projects, Macroanalysis attempts the double goal of explaining a new method and exemplifying the type of insights that can be achieved via this method. Unlike many projects, Jockers succeeds masterfully at both. Macroanalysis introduces its readers to large scale quantitative methods for studying literary history, and through those methods explores the nature of creativity and influence in general and the place of Irish literature within its larger context in particular.

Topic Modeling in the Humanities

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The cat is out of the bag: The Journal of Digital Humanities (2:1), special issue on topic modeling, has been released. It’s a fairly apt phrase, because the process of editing the issue felt a bit like stuffing a cat in a bag. When Elijah Meeks approached the JDH editors about he and I guest editing an issue on topic modeling, I don’t think either of us quite realized exactly what that would entail. This post is not about the issue or its contents; Elijah and I already wrote that introduction, where we trace the history of topic modeling in the humanities and frame the articles in the issue. Instead, I’d like to take a short post waxing a bit more reflexive than is usual for this blog, discussing my first experience guest editing a journal and how it all came together. Elijah’s similar post can be found here.

On the importance of a single historical author

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I have a dirty admission to make: I think yesterday happened. Actually. Objectively. Stuff happened. I hear that’s still a controversial statement in some corners of the humanities, but I can’t say for sure; I generally avoid those corners. And I think descriptions of the historical evidence can vary in degrees of accuracy, separating logically coherent but historically implausible conspiracy theories from more likely narratives.

At the same time, what we all think of as the past is a construct. A bunch of people – historians, cosmologists, evolutionary biologists, your grandmother who loves to tell stories, you – have all worked together to construct and reconstruct the past. Lots of pasts, actually, because no two people can ever wholly agree; everybody sees the evidence through the lens of their own historical baggage.

In Defense of Collaboration

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Being a very round-about review of the new work of fiction by Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

Ship’s Logs and Collaborative DH

Ben Schmidt has stolen the limelight of the recent digital humanities blogosphere, writing a phenomenal series of not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, but seven posts about ship logs and digital history. They’re a whale of a read, and whale worth it too (okay, okay, I’m sorry, I had to), but the point for the purpose of this post is his conclusion:

Analyzing submissions to Digital Humanities 2013

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Digital Humanities 2013 is on its way; submissions are closed, peers will be reviewing them shortly, and (most importantly for this post) the people behind the conference are experimenting with a new method of matching submissions to reviewers. It’s a bidding process; reviewers take a look at the many submissions and state their reviewing preferences or, when necessary, conflicts of interest. It’s unclear the extent to which these preferences will be accommodated, as this is an experiment on their part. Bethany Nowviskie describes it here. As a potential reviewer, I just went through the process of listing my preferences, and managed to do some data scraping while I was there. How could I not? All 348 submission titles were available to me, as well as their authors, topic selections, and keywords, and given that my submission for this year is all about quantitatively analyzing DH, it was an opportunity I could not pass up. Given that these data are sensitive, and those who submitted did so under the assumption that rejected submissions would remain private, I’m opting not to release the data or any non-aggregated information. I’m also doing my best not to actually read the data in the interest of the privacy of my peers; I suppose you’ll all just have to trust me on that one, though.

Topic nets

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I’m sorry. I love you (you know who you are, all of you). I really do. I love your work, I think it’s groundbreaking and transformative, but the network scientist / statistician in me twitches uncontrollably whenever he sees someone creating a network out of a topic model by picking the top-n topics associated with each document and using those as edges in a topic-document network. This is meant to be a short methodology post for people already familiar with LDA and already analyzing networks it produces, so I won’t bend over backwards trying to re-explain networks and topic modeling. Most of my posts are written assuming no expert knowledge, so I apologize if in the interest of brevity this one isn’t immediately accessible.

Predicting victors in an attention and feedback economy

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

This post is about computer models and how they relate to historical research, even though it might not seem like it at first. Or at second. Or third. But I encourage anyone who likes history and models to stick with it, because it gets to a distinction of model use that isn’t made frequently enough.

Music in a vacuum

Imagine yourself uninfluenced by the tastes of others: your friends, their friends, and everyone else. It’s an effort in absurdity, but try it, if only to pin down how their interests affect yours. Start with something simple, like music. If you want to find music you liked, you might devise a program that downloads random songs from the internet and plays them back without revealing their genre or other relevant metadata, so you can select from that group to get an unbiased sample of songs you like. It’s a good first step, given that you generally find music by word-of-mouth, seeing your friends’ last.fm playlists, listening to what your local radio host thinks is good, and so forth. The music that hits your radar is determined by your social and technological environment, so the best way to break free from this stifling musical determinism is complete randomization.

Making pretty things with R and ggplot2

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400

This isn’t going to be a long tutorial. I’ve just had three people asking how I made the pretty graphs on my last post about counting citations, and I’m almost ashamed to admit how easy it was. Somebody with no experience coding can (I hope) follow these steps and make themselves a pretty picture with the data provided, and understand how it was created.

library(ggplot2)
sci=read.csv("scicites.csv")
qplot(Cited, data = sci, geom="density", fill=YearRange, log="x", xlab="Number of Citations",

That’s the whole program. Oh, also this table, saved as a csv:

How many citations does a paper have to get before it's significantly above baseline impact for the field?

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400

How many citations does a paper have to get before it’s significantly above baseline impact for the field? Can anyone answer this basic Q?

— mrgunn (@mrgunn) September 20, 2012

[Note: This blog post was originally hidden because it’s not aimed at my usual audience. I decided to open it up because, hey, I guess it’s okay for all you humanists and data scientists to know that one of the other hats I wear is that of an informetrician. Another reason I kept it hidden is because I’m pretty scared of how people use citation impact ratings to evaluate research for things like funding and tenure, often at the expense of other methods that ought be used when human livelihoods are at stake. So please don’t do that.]

Currated syllabi

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Those who follow me on twitter already know about my new curated course syllabi page, but here’s an announcement for the RSS crowd (I’m looking at you, Elijah). Basically, there are a bunch of DH courses out there (and great lists of syllabi at CUNY, the DH Working Group on Zotero, and the DH Education Group on Zotero), but I know of no resource that specifically focuses on the computational / algorithmic / quantitative humanities syllabi, so I decided to put one together. You can find it here, as well as in the pages menu up top, at this point including 19 courses taught over 24 semesters, and I welcome suggestions of more.

Google Maps for the Ancient World

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The title of this post comes from an oft-quoted passage of my previous one describing ORBIS, a scholarly argument cleverly disguised as a web tool. Of ORBIS I wrote

…given any two cities in the ancient world, it returns the fastest, cheapest, or shortest route between them, given the month, the mode of transportation, and various other options. It’s Google Maps for the ancient world, complete with the “Avoid Highways” feature.

In writing that review, I neglected to mention the many fantastic resources out there that already map the ancient world, including the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization and PLEIADES, a gazetteer and graph of ancient places. The most impressive full-featured online GIS application I’ve seen is called Antiquity À-la-carte, shown below. The classicists have once again proven themselves to be at the bleeding edge of technology. When they keep developing cool toys like these, I sometimes regret being an early modernist. Sometimes.

On Simplicity

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400

You can build complex arguments on a very simple foundation

–Ted Underwood

The world is full of very complex algorithms honed to solve even more complex problems. When you use your phone as a GPS, it’s not a simple matter of triangulating signals from towers or satellites. Because your GPS receiver has to know the precise time (in nanoseconds) at the satellites it’s receiving signals from, and because the satellites are moving at various speeds and orbiting at an altitude where the force of gravity is significantly different, calculating times gets quite complicated due to the effects of relativity. The algorithms that allow the GPS to work have to take relativity into account, often on the fly, and without those complex algorithms the GPS would not be nearly so precise.

Another Step in Keeping Pledges

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Long-time readers of this blog might remember that, a while ago, I pledged to do pretty much Open Everything. Last week, a friend in my department asked how I managed that without having people steal my ideas. It’s a tough question, and I’m still not certain whether my answer has more to do with idealist naïveté or actual forward-thought. Time will tell. As it is, the pool of people doing similar work to mine is small, and they pretty much all know about this blog, so I’m confident the crowd of rabid academics will keep each other in check. Still, I suppose we all have to be on guard for the occasional evil professor, wearing his white lab coat, twirling his startling mustachio, and just itching to steal the idle musings of a still-very-confused Ph.D. student.

Topic Modeling for Humanists: A Guided Tour

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

It’s that time again! Somebody else posted a really clear and enlightening description of topic modeling on the internet. This time it was Allen Riddell, and it’s so good that it inspired me to write this post about topic modeling that includes no actual new information, but combines a lot of old information in a way that will hopefully be useful. If there’s anything I’ve missed, by all means let me know and I’ll update accordingly.

Networks Demystified 3: The Power Law Rant

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Dear humanists, scientists, music-makers, and dreamers of dreams,

Stop. Please, please, please stop telling me about the power law / Pareto distribution / Zipf’s law you found in your data. I know it’s exciting, and I know power laws are sexy these days, but really the only excuse to show off your power law is if it’s followed by:

How it helps you predict/explain something you couldn’t before.
Why a power law is so very strange as opposed to some predicted distribution (e.g., normal, uniform, totally bodacious, etc.).
A comparison against other power law distributions, and how parameters differ across them.
Anything else that a large chunk of the scholarly community hasn’t already said about power laws.

Alright, I know not all of you have broken this rule, and many of you may not be familiar enough with what I’m talking about to care, so I’m going to give a quick primer here on power law and scale-free distributions (they’re the same thing). If you want to know more, read Newman’s (2005) seminal paper.

The Myth of Text Analytics and Unobtrusive Measurement

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Just realized Klout is the perfect metaphor for media in the modern era. It assumes you’re an expert in anything you talk a lot about.

— Dan Munz (@dan_munz) May 5, 2012

Text analytics are often used in the social sciences as a way of unobtrusively observing people and their interactions. Humanists tend to approach the supporting algorithms with skepticism, and with good reason. This post is about the difficulties of using words or counts as a proxy for some secondary or deeper meaning. Although I offer no solutions here, readers of the blog will know I am hopeful of the promise of these sorts of measurements if used appropriately, and right now, we’re still too close to the cutting edge to know exactly what that means. There are, however, copious examples of text analytics used well in the humanities (most recently, for example, Joanna Guldi’s publication on the history of walking).

ORBIS: The next step in Digital Humanities

Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Every once in a while, a new project comes around bearing a message loud and clear: this is a sign of things to come. ORBIS, the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, is one such project.

ORBIS was created by Walter Scheidel, Elijah Meeks, and a host of others. At the very beginning, I should point out I am not a classicist. The below review is of the nature rather than the content of ORBIS as a scholarly product.

Science Systems Engineering

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Warning: This post is potentially evil, and definitely normative. While I am unsure whether what I describe below should be done*,* I’m becoming increasingly certain that it could be. Read with caution.

Complex Adaptive Systems

Science is a complex adaptive system. It is a constantly evolving network of people and ideas and artifacts which interact with and feed back on each other to produce this amorphous socio-intellectual entity we call science. Science is also a bunch of nested complex adaptive systems, some overlapping, and is itself part of many other systems besides.

Halting Conditions

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Occasionally, in computer science, the term “halting condition” is thrown around as the point at which the program should stop running.

Say I’ve got a robot that watches my roommate and I play scrabble, and I want it to count how many scrabble pieces we use, and tell us who won and what the highest scoring word was. Unfortunately, let’s say, I’m also Superman, so our scrabble games frequently end early when I hear cries for help and run off to the nearest phone booth. Our robot has to decide what conditions mean the game is over so it can give us the winner report; in this case, it is either when one player runs out of pieces, or when nobody plays a piece for a significant amount of time, because games often end early. Those are our halting conditions.

The Internet Listens

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The public science blogosphere has recently been buzzing about an online edited book review called Download The Universe. The twist is that the editors only review online-only science books, and their definition of “book” is broadly construed:

[W]e define ebooks broadly. They may be self-published pdf manuscripts. They may be Kindle Singles about science. They can even be apps that have games embedded in them. We hope that we will eventually review new kinds of ebooks that we can’t even imagine yet. And we hope that you will find Download the Universe a useful doorway into that future.

More heavy-handed culturomics

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

A few days ago, Gao, Hu, Mao, and Perc posted a preprint of their forthcoming article comparing social and natural phenomena. The authors, apparently all engineers and physicists, use the google ngrams data to come to the conclusion that “social and natural phenomena are governed by fundamentally different processes.” The take-home message is that words describing natural phenomena increase in frequency at regular, predictable rates, whereas the use of certain socially-oriented words change in unpredictable ways. Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t necessarily differentiate between words and what they describe.

The Networked Structure of Scientific Growth

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Well, it looks like Digital Humanities Now scooped me on posting my own article. As some of you may have read, I recently did not submit a paper on the Republic of Letters, opting instead to hold off until I could submit it to a journal which allowed authorial preprint distribution. Preprints are a vital part of rapid knowledge exchange in our ever-quickening world, and while some disciplines have embraced the preprint culture, many others have yet to. I’d love the humanities to embrace that practice, and in the spirit of being the change you want to see in the world, I’ve decided to post a preprint of my Republic of Letters paper, which I will be submitting to another journal in the near future. You can read the full first draft here.

On Keeping Pledges

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

A few months back, I posted a series of pledges about being a good scholarly citizen. Among other things, I pledged to keep my data and code open whenever possible, and to fight to retain the right to distribute materials pending and following their publication. I also signed the Open Access Pledge. Since then, a petition boycotting Elsevier cropped up with very similar goals, and as of this writing has nearly 7,000 signatures.

As a young scholar with as-yet no single authored publications (although one is pending in the forward-thinking Journal of Digital Humanities, which you should all go and peer review), I had to think very carefully in making these pledges. It’s a dangerous world out there for people who aren’t free to publish in whatever journal they like; reducing my publication options is not likely to win me anything but good karma.

Flow and Empty Space

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Thirty spokes unite in one nave and on that which is non-existent [on the hole in the nave] depends the wheel’s utility. Clay is moulded into a vessel and on that which is non-existent [on its hollowness] depends the vessel’s utility. By cutting out doors and windows we build a house and on that which is non-existent [on the empty space within] depends the house’s utility. Therefore, existence renders actual but non-existence renders useful.

Citing ODH’s Summer Institutes

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

While I generally like to reserve posts for a wider audience, this is the second time I’ve come across this particular issue, and I’d like help from the masses. Every summer, the NEH’s Office for Digital Humanities funds a series of Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. I’ve had the great fortune of attending one on computer simulations in the humanities, and teaching at one on network analysis for the humanities. I often find myself wishing I could cite one, as a whole, because of all the valuable experience and knowledge I received there. Unfortunately I have found no standard format to cite whole conferences, workshops, or summer institutes.

Early Modern Letters Online

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Early modern history! Science! Letters! Data! Four of my favoritest things have been combined in this brand new beta release of Early Modern Letters Online from Oxford University.

EMLO Logo

Summary

EMLO (what an adorable acronym, I kind of what to tickle it) is Oxford’s answer to a metadata database (metadatabase?) of, you guessed it, early modern letters. This is pretty much a gold standard metadata project. It’s still in beta, so there are some interface kinks and desirable features not-yet-implemented, but it has all the right ingredients for a great project:

Quick Followup to Avoiding Traps

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

So apparently yesterday was a big day for hypothesis testing and discovery. Stanley Fish’s third post on Digital Humanities also brought up the issue of fishing for correlations, although his post was… slightly more polemic. Rather than going over it on this blog, I’ll let Ted Underwood describe it. Anybody who read my post on Avoiding Traps should also read Underwood’s post; it highlights the role of discovery in the humanities as a continuous process of appraisal and re-appraisal, both on the quantitative and qualitative side.

Avoiding traps

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

We have the advantage of arriving late to the game.

In the cut-throat world of high-tech venture capitalism, the first company with a good idea often finds itself at the mercy of latecomers. The latecomer’s product might be better-thought-out, advertised to a more appropriate market, or simply prettier, but in each case that improvement comes through hindsight. Trailblazers might get there first, but their going is slowest, and their way the most dangerous.

Doing Bayesian Data Analysis

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

A few months ago, Science published a Thanksgiving article on what scientists can be grateful for. It’s got a lot of good points, like being thankful for family members who accept the crazy hours we work, or for those really useful research projects that make science cool enough for us to get funding for the merely really interesting. It does have one unfortunate reference to humanists:

We are thankful that Ph.D. programs in the sciences, as much as we complain about them, aren’t nearly as horrifying as, say, Ph.D. programs in the humanities. I just heard today from a friend in his ninth year of a comparative literature Ph.D. who thinks he might finish “in a year and a half.” At least the job market for comp lit Ph.D. awardees is thriving, right?

Networks Demystified 2: Degree

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Herein lies Part the Second of n posts introducing various network concepts. Part the First can be found here. From here on out, the posts will be cover only one topic at a time. I’ll occasionally use math, but will do my best to explain it from the ground up, assuming no previous knowledge of mathematical notation.

Node Degree: An Introduction

Today I’ll cover the deceptively simple concept of node degree. I say “deceptive” because, on the one hand, network degree can tell you quite a lot. On the other hand, degree can often lead one astray, especially as networks become larger and more complicated.

Pledges

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

By Scott Weingart · 2011-12-15

I know I’m a little late to the game, but open access is important year-round, and I only just recently got the chance to write these up. Below are my pledges to open access, which can also be found on the navigation tab above.

The system of pay-to-subscribe journals that spent so many centuries helping the scholarly landscape coordinate and collaborate is now obsolete; a vestigial organ in the body of science.

Demystifying Networks

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Part 1 of n: An Introduction

A bunch of my recent posts have mentioned networks. Elijah Meeks not-so-subtly hinted that it might be a good idea to discuss some of the basics of networks on this blog, and I’m happy to oblige. He already introduced network visualizations on his own blog, and did a fantastic job of it, so I’m going to try to stick to more of the conceptual issues here, gearing the discussion generally toward people with little-to-no background in networks or math, and specifically to digital humanists interested in applying network analysis to their own work. This will be part of an ongoing series, so if you have any requests, please feel free to mention them in the comments below (I’ve already been asked to discuss how social networks apply to fictional worlds, which is probably next on the list).

Contextualizing networks with maps

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Last post, I talked about combining textual and network analysis. Both are becoming standard tools in the methodological toolkit of the digital humanist, sitting next to GIS in what seems to be becoming the Big Three in computational humanities.

Data as Context, Data as Contextualized

Humanists are starkly aware that no particular aspect of a subject sits in a vacuum; context is key. A network on its own is a set of meaningless relationships without a knowledge of what travels through and across it, what entities make it up, and how that network interacts with the larger world. The network must be contextualized by the content. Conversely, the networks in which people and processes are situated deeply affect those entities: medium shapes message and topology shapes influence. The content must be contextualized by the network.

Topic Modeling and Network Analysis

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

According to Google Scholar, David Blei’s first topic modeling paper has received 3,540 citations since 2003. Everybody’s talking about topic models. Seriously, I’m afraid of visiting my parents this Hanukkah and hearing them ask “Scott… what’s this topic modeling I keep hearing all about?” They’re powerful, widely applicable, easy to use, and difficult to understand — a dangerous combination.

Since shortly after Blei’s first publication, researchers have been looking into the interplay between networks and topic models. This post will be about that interplay, looking at how they’ve been combined, what sorts of research those combinations can drive, and a few pitfalls to watch out for. I’ll bracket the big elephant in the room until a later discussion, whether these sorts of models capture the semantic meaning for which they’re often used. This post also attempts to introduce topic modeling to those not yet fully ~~converted~~ aware of its potential.

Are we bad social scientists?

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

There has been a recent slew of fantastic posts about critical theory and discourse in the digital humanities. To sum up: hacking, yacking, we need more of it, we already have enough of it thank you very much, just deal with the French names already, openness, data, Hope! The unabridged version is available for free at an Internet near you. At this point in the conversation, it seems the majority involved agree that the digital needs more humanity, the humans need more digital, and the two aren’t necessarily as distinct as they seem.

Bridging the gap

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Traditional disciplinary silos have always been useful fictions. They help us organize our research centers, our journals, our academies, and our lives. However much simplicity we gain from quickly and easily being able to place research X into box Y, however, is offset by the requirement of fitting research X into one and only one box Y. What we gain in simplicity, we lose in flexibility.

Alchemy, Text Analysis, and Networks! Oh my!

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0400

“Newton wrote and transcribed about a million words on the subject of alchemy.” –chymistry.org

Beside bringing us things like calculus, universal gravitation, and perhaps the inspiration for certain Pink Floyd albums, Isaac Newton spent many years researching what was then known as “chymistry,” a multifaceted precursor to, among other things, what we now call chemistry, pharmacology, and alchemy.

Pink Floyd and the Occult: Discuss.

Researchers at Indiana University, notably William R. Newman, John A. Walsh, Dot Porter, and Wallace Hooper, have spent the last several years developing The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, an absolutely wonderful history of science resource which, as of this past month, has digitized all 59 of Newton’s alchemical manuscripts assembled by John Keynes in 1936. Among the sites features are heavily annotated transcriptions, manuscript images, often scholarly synopses, and examples of alchemical experiments. That you can try at home. That’s right, you can do alchemy with this website. They also managed to introduce alchemical symbols into unicode (U+1F700 – U+1F77F), which is just indescribably cool.

#humnets paper/review

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

by scottbot — 2011-10-22 — filed under Uncategorized

UCLA’s Networks and Network Analysis for the Humanities this past weekend did not fail to impress. Tim Tangherlini and his mathemagical imps returned in true form, organizing a really impressively realized (and predictably jam-packed) conference that left the participants excited, exhausted, enlightened, and unanimously shouting for more next year (and the year after, and the year after that, and the year after that…) I cannot thank the ODH enough for facilitating this and similar events.

the scottbot irregular on Scott B. Weingart

The Index of Digital Humanities Conferences

The Data

Seeking New Physics

Modeling Space Ships from Ocean Liners

Caveats

The Route of a Text Message

The Center for Midnight

Encouraging Misfits

Argument Clinic

Teaching Yourself to Code in DH

Submissions to DH2017 (pt. 1)

Lessons From Digital History’s Antecedents

[f-s d] Cetus

Experience

An autistic academic explores the stigma of mental-health issues (essay)

“Digital History” Can Never Be New

The Turing Point

Summary: Martin & Runyon’s “Digital Humanities, Digital Hegemony”

Who sits in the 41st chair?

Acceptances to DH2016 (pt. 1)

Representation at Digital Humanities Conferences (2000-2015)

Gender Inclusivity in Six Degrees

Submissions to DH2016 (pt. 1)

Ghosts in the Machine

Forgetting The Holocaust

What’s Counted Counts

Down the Rabbit Hole

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2015 (part 4)

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2015 (part 3)

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2015 (part 2)

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2015 (part 1)

Not Enough Perspectives, Pt. 1

Culturomics 2: The Search for More Money

Networks Demystified 9: Bimodal Networks

Digital History, Saturn’s Rings, and the Battle of Trafalgar

Submissions to Digital Humanities 2015 (pt. 3)

Submissions to Digital Humanities 2015 (pt. 1)

Submissions to Digital Humanities 2015 (pt. 2)

The moral role of DH in a data-driven world

[Review] The Book of Trees, Manuel Lima

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2014 (part 1)

Barriers to Scholarship & Iterative Writing

Self-Plagiarism

Understanding Special Relativity through History and Triangles (pt. 1)

Do historians need scientists?

Appreciability & Experimental Digital Humanities

Bridging Token and Type

A Working Definition of Digital Humanites

Networks Demystified 8: When Networks are Inappropriate

Submissions to Digital Humanities 2014

Historians, Doctors, and their Absence

Networks Demystified 7: Doing Co-Citation Analyses

Networks Demystified 5: Communities, PageRank, and Sampling Caveats

Breaking the Ph.D. model using pretty pictures

Improving the Journal of Digital Humanities

From Trees to Webs: Uprooting Knowledge through Visualization

The Historian’s Macroscope

An experiment in communal editing: Finding the history & philosophy of science.

Networks Demystified 4: Co-Citation Analysis

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2013 (part 1)

Friends don't let friends calculate p-values (without fully understanding them)

On MOOCs

Liveblogged Review of Macroanalysis by Matthew L. Jockers, Part 2

Part II: Analysis

Liveblogged Review of Macroanalysis by Matthew L. Jockers, Part 1

Topic Modeling in the Humanities

On the importance of a single historical author

In Defense of Collaboration

Ship’s Logs and Collaborative DH

Analyzing submissions to Digital Humanities 2013

Topic nets

Predicting victors in an attention and feedback economy

Music in a vacuum

Making pretty things with R and ggplot2

How many citations does a paper have to get before it's significantly above baseline impact for the field?

Currated syllabi

Google Maps for the Ancient World

On Simplicity

Celestial Navigation