- May 2022
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www.digitalhumanities.org www.digitalhumanities.org
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They render quantitative relations with a transparency that seems natural, so that, for instance, if we look at the changes in population across a series of years for a particular location, we can simply accept that from one year to the next rises or drops occurred in the numbers of persons alive in X city in X country at X time.
Think of the bar/line charts employed by Blevins that demonstrate the occurence of a cluster of words related to weather or gardening that are compared to months of the year along the x-axis
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Capta is “taken” actively while data is assumed to be a “given” able to be recorded and observed
This brings up the notion of ethics in research - information that is taken rather than given and the inherent power dynamic
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But they do not present themselves as categories of interpretation, riven with ambiguity and uncertainty, because of the representational force of the visualization as a “picture” of “data”
Data we take as objective truth, has a hidden layer of subjective interpretation that is glossed over or ignored when we try to distill information into hard data.
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the sheer power of the graphical display of “information visualization” (and its novelty within a humanities community newly enthralled with the toys of data mining and display) seems to have produced a momentary blindness among practitioners who would never tolerate such literal assumptions in textual work.
Interesting antithesis to the post form Blevins, which espouses the possibilities that new machine-driven techniques of data analysis provide.
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www.cameronblevins.org www.cameronblevins.org
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and over the course of the diary’s average year they also beautifully depict the fingerprint of Maine’s seasonal cycles:
I love how the prevalence of certain words reflects the natural environment - much like how weather terms like cold and snow appear most in entries made during the cold and snowy months. The diary therefore is not just an account of one person's life, but of the geographical location that they inhabit.
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MALLET did a better job of grouping words than a human reader.
I guess this answers my previous question.
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The most descriptive label I could assign this topic would be EMOTION – a tricky and elusive concept for humans to analyze, much less computers.
It would be interesting to compare how a human reading the diary entries from this particular period would pick up on this change in emotional state. Are machines better at identifying these shifts through mathematical calculation over human intuition?
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topic modeling, a method of computational linguistics that attempts to find words that frequently appear together within a text and then group them into clusters.
We use a similar strategy in communication studies when conducting textual analysis. We use encoding to apply labels to recurring themes in different texts, interviews, images, etc. to find larger, overarching themes that link different media.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Amalia S. Levi@amaliasl·Jun 8, 2020The gap we see between April 13 and April 30, 1816, in #TheBarbadosMercury gazette does not signify lack of material. It reflects the slave revolt between April 14 to April 16 that shut down the island for nearly two weeks (printing house included). 6/ https://dloc.com/AA00047511/00001/allvolumes…12Amalia S. Levi@amaliasl·Jun 8, 2020(It is interesting that when the April 30 issue came out, there is no mention of the revolt. Only on the second page do we find information about the “perfidious league of slaves” that went around pillaging and destroying the island, and about their fate). 7/
It's interesting to see how these gaps can form - and without background knowledge on the history of that period, the gap would have no context or meaning. It would just be a blip. But that gap has significant historical importance, particularly how information about the revolt was suppressed at the time.
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