A product of historical research and an aid to further research itself, computational remediations of texts, such as a topic model, inhabit an important though currently under-valued space within the world of historical scholarship and the digital humanities.

These words, and the contexts in which they appeared in the journal articles, reinforced the claim that Seventh-day Adventist authors were focused on the second coming to a significant degree in those years.

world events in the years surrounding.

Together, the significant appearance of “Advertisement” and “Bible” related words within the literature of the year further reinforces that the topics identified through the aggregated topic model correspond with those identified through keyword measures

Here again the results of comparing the words used in 1880 to the surrounding decade in AntConc seem to confirm the pattern from the topic model.

In addition to anti-Catholic sentiment, the authors were increasingly vocal about their interpretation of “the two-horned beast” of Revelation 13 as refering to the government of the United States, reflecting increasing efforts during this time to pass Sabbath-keeping legislatio

While the second coming might still be seen as a far off event, anticipation thereof was a reinforced as a central component of the Seventh-day Adventist faith, along with “time” as a significant part of God’s revelation to his people

“goat,” t

51, 117, 145, 170, 182, and 199

As evidenced in the chart above, throughout this period of study questions of theology and spiritual development were a consistent feature of the periodical literature of the SDA. These topics together contributed approximately 10% to 25% of the content produced in a given year

the whole corpus, we can see both continuities and clear shifts in the subject matter of the periodical literature of the denomination.

While not setting a date, the leadership of the denomination reinforced a clear belief that these were auspicious days, pointing to various signs and indications of the end of time to remind themselves of where they stood in time and the need for action to show themselves as faithful to their calling in such last days.

rercords

to the importance of the law, including Sabbath law and “laws of nature” around issues of health,

As a product of Miller’s teachings as well as of these new cultural emphases, Seventh-day Adventism is less a late expression of Second Great Awakening revivalism than a result of the ongoing reshaping of that tradition in light of these later cultural shifts.

Ellen White’s prophetic career launched without the benefits of marriage, and she was initially reluctant to marry James White lest it imply “a denial of faith in an imminent second coming.

Rather than part of an ongoing thread of revivalistic religion, Bratt and Doan locate Miller at the end of a period of upheaval, as marking the beginning of a cultural shift away from the exuberant, individualistic, and emotional religion of the revivals and toward the more structured, institutionalized, and character-focused religion of the mid and late nineteenth century.

Miller functioned, in this interpretation, as the logical conclusion of the revivalism of the early republic period.

and so their theology reframed the prophetic role of the state, not denying that the United States had a particular role in the events to come, but reinterpreting what that role would be

One final distinctive element of early Seventh-day Adventist theology was their understanding of the role of the United States government in the unfolding of the divine plan.

The need for theological flexibility was part of the group’s basic character from early on, as believers successfully shifted from understanding October 22, 1844, as the date of Jesus’ physical second coming to understanding it as the beginning of his work of atonement within the heavenly Sanctuary and in embracing Sabbath-keeping as the new sign or test distinguishing true believers.

It also set the intellectual stage for the development of their emphasis on health as part of the religious life of believers.

composed of a physical body and a separate immortal soul, early Seventh-day Adventists viewed humans as “indivisible beings who did not possess natural immortality.

ere I outline some of the other unique theological positions of the denomination to help frame the later discussion of their development.

However, this proved a culturally contentious issue for the community of adventists, many of whom understood separation from the state and the rejection of denominations as central to their charge to be a separate people.

The publication location of the White’s initial periodicals reflect the family’s, and the religious community’s, movement from upper New England toward the West. Initially based out of Maine, where the Harmon family was located, as early as 1849 their teaching had been brought as far west as Michigan through the preaching of Joseph Bates. In 1851, in order to make it easier to travel to the far reaches of the dispersed community and to more cheaply distribute the periodical, the Whites moved their publishing operation to upstate New York, first to Saratoga Springs, and in 1852 to Rochester.7

Central to that “present truth” was the necessity of keeping the Decalogue (the ten commandments) and the teaching that the commandment to “honor the Sabbath day” required Christian observance on Saturday (Friday sundown to Saturday sundown) rather than Sunday.

Ellen Harmon White established herself early on as an authoritative prophetic voice for the adventist community struggling to understand how to reconcile their interpretation of the Bible and the events they experienced. James White, who had worked as a Millerite lecturer and correspondent, was one of her earliest converts and became her primary publicist. It is through their combined efforts that the Seventh-day Adventist church coalesced and grew in the years after 1844.

Alexander Campbell in Pennsylvania,

These efforts were often framed in religious terms, as reformers saw themselves as part of the divine plan for the unfolding of the world. The beginning and end of this plan were known: creation began in the garden of Eden and would end with the establishment of God’s eternal kingdom. Human actors lived through and contributed to that progression, setting in motion the events that propelled God’s plan and used their vision of the unfolding “cosmic drama” to guide their actions and interpret the events of their lives

primitivism or restorationism.

This was a strategy that the Seventh-day Adventists would later emulate, first as they came together around the publication of a new interpretation of Miller’s teachings and the events of 1844, and later as they sent out missionaries, establishing printing houses in each new geographic region they entered

harles Fitch’s “A Chronological Chart of the Visions of Daniel and John.” (1843). From the Adventist Digital Library. https://adventistdigitallibrary.org/adl-421834/chronological-chart-visions-daniel-and-john. Accessed 6 September 2017.

Charles Fitch’s “A Chronological Chart of the Visions of Daniel and John.” (1843). From the Adventist Digital Library. https://adventistdigitallibrary.org/adl-421834/chronological-chart-visions-daniel-and-john. Accessed 6 September 2017.

hip.

While echoing the growing emphasis on women’s role in the home, the denomination continued to honor a woman, Ellen White, as prophet and made space for women’s labor as lecturers, missionaries, medical professionals, and teachers. Their approach to health included both an early emphasis on divine healing and a gradual embrace of medical intervention within the framework of following God’s natural law. Their understanding of end-times and salvation positioned the government of the United States as the anticipated adversary, rather than the protagonist of God’s unfolding plan.

Looking beyond their roots in Miller’s millennial teaching, the study of Seventh-day Adventism offers another lens on cultural trends within nineteenth-century America, and particularly on the role of end-times expectation on the ways such trends were experienced and incorporated by religious and cultural groups

Periods of war and conflict, while distressing and a sign of things to come, were not conducive to the type of global unification and establishment of religion that would mark the final confrontation

Seventh-day Adventist leaders and others decried them as attacks on freedom of religion and the principle of religious liberty. Any attempt to exercise state power in issues of religion was the beginning of the end, both of the nation and of time, for Adventist commentators.

As resistance to the legislation of religion was understood to be one of the marks of true believers, believers tracked efforts to promote the passing of religion laws, and politically organized members to resist those efforts.

And throughout the period, authors warned readers to anticipate unrest and persecution in the time leading up to the Jesus’ return (topic #179). World events were not just curiosities, but vital clues in tracing the unfolding of God’s plan

As these concepts became more ingrained in Adventist theology and became basic to their cultural imaginary, fewer words would have been needed to invoke these ideas for readers

return is central to their distinctive understanding of Scripture and their self-understanding as God’s chosen people.

imperfect messengers

development of a consensus around the position of the Adventist people in sacred time.

Revelations throughout their writings to argue for their unique sense of time, to explain current events, and to anticipate events to come.

“Prophecy is history in advance,” 19 in these themes Seventh-day Adventist authors and readers sought to understand where they stood in the temporal landscape, to verify their understanding of 1844 and their particular role in the unfolding of God’s plan, and to explain the events of the day in light of the larger trajectory of God’s plan

while patriarchal, also contains markable “feminine” characteristics

of that message expands.

“the seeming contradictions of White’s admonitions, life, and advice are not easily reconciled.

they help explain periods of unusually expansive behavior within religious and cultural groups, as well as the more subtle but lasting cultural shifts that revival moments leave in their wake.

female preachers and visionaries to the religious movements of the first and second great awakenings

current temporal imaginary.

probation

Teaching the Baltimore Uprising seeks to address this gap in the teaching and learning of Maryland history, and connect this history to contemporary events.

In examining digital projects focused on contemporary events and crowd-sourced hashtag syllabi, it is easy to notice their inaccessibility to teachers and students for classroom use outside the academy.

The Baltimore Uprising of 2015, while clearly precipitated by the extrajudicial death of Freddie Gray in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood, was historically rooted in the results of these racist policies.

Second, it was the first American city to pass an ordinance mandating “the separation of the white and black races in their place of residence; to prohibit the negro from intruding himself and his family as permanent residents in a district already dedicated to the white race, and equally: to prevent the white man from forcing himself upon a district given over to a negro.”

In considering American urban history, narratives of larger cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago tend to dominate. However, Baltimore place in American urban history is predicated on two facts. First, it was home to the country’s largest population of free African Americans in the antebellum period.

and lesson plans will be developed and reviewed by a team of historians and teachers (both pre-service and in-service) from around the state in diverse school settings (public, public charter, independent, religious, home-based).

1.To place the Baltimore Uprising of 2015 within the context of Baltimore’s history specifically, and American urban history writ large. 2.To center children and young people as active agents in the history of Baltimore in particular, and Maryland generally. 3.To serve as a repository of sources (both primary and secondary) and standards-aligned lesson plans related to Baltimore’s history. 4.To transform classrooms into active, interpretative spaces.

Teaching the Baltimore Uprising, an online Omeka exhibition, will help teachers and students in grades 7-12 better understand the historical antecedents of the Baltimore Uprising of 2015, while building students’ historical analysis skills.

$10,00

The Socity holds more than 350,00 objects and seven million books and documents.

copying my creative idea without permission could actually stimulate a greater amount of originality

disco-dancing porn star and there would be nothing I could do about it as long as Superwong somehow transformed the original concept

if I create a unique fictional concept that could reasonably qualify as art, I or my representatives should have the opportunity to profit from or at least approve of its derivatives

In fact, the supreme court ruled that the farmer had, in fact, been damaged by the flights and, while common sense balks at any claim to infinite space, it does not do so for airspace between 83 and 365 feet, a reasonable amount of space above farm buildings necessary for the enjoyment of the farmer’s private property.

[NOTE: I cannot cite from the copy of this book that I have because it is awful. There are no page numbers, no charts/illustrations, the editing (if there was any at all) is atrocious, and there is a reasonable (and ironic) chance that it was pirated for sale online. So, with that in mind

which is one reason why academics have continued to sub specialize- the available material on some subjects is simply too vast.

“assuming that a dedicated scholar could find these novels and read one per day, it would take sixteen and a half years reading to get through them all

“this is a book about evidence gathering. It is a book about how new methods of analysis allow us to extract new forms of evidence from the digital library”

This book seeks to bridge a gap between the finite abilities of researchers and the seemingly infinite abilities of computers. 

The explosion of printed text since the invention of the printing press have left subsequent generations with more and more material for interpretation Additionally, the dramatic increase in population has brought about more people to study. Even the ease of writing and distributing new material (such as blogs by lowly grad students) have dramatically the available data for research. This has simultaneously provided the interpreters of history, literature, and countless other academic pursuits with more resources to complete their tasks, and created an excess of information to be sorted through.

Macroanalysis and is interested in attempting text analysis? How do they create a corpus? What should they do if they are on a campus that lacks resources for humanities computing? These are questions that, if addressed, could go a long way in expanding the ranks of digital literary scholars.

my reading focused more on tracking the strategies Jockers applied to his corpus than focusing on the results of the use of those strategies

particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing large amounts of data.[6]

Matthew Jockers refers to this incident, this “kerfuffle,” as a public failure of computing in the humanities, yet it frames the argument he proceeds to make in his book, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History

or Donald Foster used stylometrics to assert that the previously anonymous “A Funeral Elegy” was written by William Shakespeare.[1] In May 2002, an article by Gilles D. Monsarrat in The Review of English Studies refuted Foster’s claim, using close reading to conclude the poem’s author was another English dramatist—John Ford.[2] Upon reviewing Monsarrat’s article, Foster recanted his original claim in June 2002, noting “I know good evidence when I see it and I predict that Monsarrat will win the day.

However, the long-term evaluation should also be measured in the number of published works that credit the site in their bibliographies yet that should only be looked at after about 5 years when historians and others have had sufficient time to publish their finding

These two would be consultants who could effectively judge the contributions and whether or not they were historically accurate.

freedoms we enjoy in this country and how those change (or don’t) during wartime.

Since this is an open source archive, we will not have to worry as much with permissions for material use (that will be implied by their contributing to the site)

hunting down these, often, elusive primary sources (about which I speak from experience).

This site will hopefully become a repository of primary sources that scholars will be able to search

That is what this site will attempt to accomplish.

ach of these wars had a significant amount of people file for conscientious objector status and the latter two would most likely still have living objectors willing to tell their story.

Ideally this will encompass all objectors from every war

He completely ignores the cultural distinction that might affect the outcome of his findings by referring to those who study those distinctions as “poets” (which is no doubt a slight at the scientifically disinclined and long-dead Yeats but can easily be interpreted as those who are interested in such cultural distinctions and their effects) while he as a “scholar” is above such menial distinctions.

He states, “text miners need digital texts to mine” (173) and that copyright laws have hamstrung the digitization of the many texts that fall under it. On this point, we at least agree

ironically close reading of his work.

The charts, however, provide no context nor meaning to those unfamiliar with his methodology or formula and quite often are lacking in descriptive terms to help orient the reader to what they are viewing.

“that the study of literature should be approached not simply as an examination of seminal works but as an examination of an aggregated ecosystem or ‘economy’ of texts

Additionally, the author’s condemnation of the current copyright system is muted by the fact that he presents no clear alternative to what is already in place, making feel at times as if he is criticizing merely for the sake of doing so

After reading his story I was absolutely seething at how warped our copyright system has become, which was exactly Lessig’s goal. In each chapter, he uses a story to set up his argument which many writers have done but Lessig is a true master when painting a picture of the problems plaguing this system. This book was a joy to read even if its subject matter was not.

Rather than waiting for common sense to prevail we allow those threatened by the new technologies (namely the MPAA and RIAA) to dictate how they are used.

not for the sake of the artists that this protection exists but rather for the businesses that own the copyrights

He argues that there is a shrinking divide between free and controlled culture that is a direct cause of the advent of the Internet and its capacity to share information worldwide

These avenues have long been recognized as occupying a central place in Harlem life

They pay, I think, more attention to the language of spatiality than to the spatial experience

This is an early example of what I am calling spatial history

Historians by definition focus on time.

Gleick seems to be assigning his own feelings on the importance of information to Babbage, which is something that today’s scholars can only guess

He strongly believes information is of vital importance to our society.

.  All of these show the changing values of humans over time, as they did when books were first published versus memorized.

.  He believes that our capacity for deep reading and comprehension is what sets humans apart from other animals.

As Gleick notes, we are all both patrons and librarians in the universal library of knowledge.

Science is not serving man.

Compounding the overabundance of information is that fact that when processing it we can only see the leaves and twigs, not the trees, much less the forest.

He stresses, using McLuhan’s terminology, that the Internet medium is the message, and hammers away at its many deleterious effects on humanity.

Historians can be part of the new profession of collaborative trail blazers, he asserts, “delighting in establishing useful trails through vast chronological accounts and all over civilization.” Bush urges readers not to lose hope about the outcomes of the scientific revolutions underway as a result of WWII research and development; we can control technology

Compared, the three might be seen as too hot, too cold, and just (about) right.

Here’s the Web, publish to it, find your audience, critique and debate, build your reputation for being an expert in your area of study…It is time we historians recognize that we are far behind the curve on open access to our scholarship, as we dutifully continue to write articles and monographs that take years to publish and that few will see in their paper incarnations.”

, comments on a blog post are the equivalent of peer review and publishing is publishing

Charles Babbage was born on Boxing Day 1791, near the end of the century that began with Newton,” he tells us. “He was the son of a banker, who was himself the son and grandson of goldsmiths” (Gleick, 88). Spare me.

Gleick smartly draws links between the necessity for a directory of registered addresses for telegraph companies in the early twentieth-century and the rapid, litigious efforts to colonize domain names in the cyber era

“When new information technologies alter the existing landscape, they bring disruption,” he writes. “The balance between creators and consumers is upset: writers and readers, speakers and listeners”

While he uses these to good effect, one might wonder whether he discounted contradictory studies, or whether experiments over the course of the seven years since he completed

Through reflection on a variety of experiments, Carr shows that “when scientists have trained primates and other animals to use simple tools, they’ve discovered just how profoundly the brain can be influenced by technology”

“To read a book,” he tells us, “was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object”

“deep reading.” The Shallows thus cautions us about the dangers of prioritizing the conveniences of multitasking over the richness of complexity and “singular intelligence” (Carr, 143).

s. However, in summation I believe that this is a well written examination of the theory of information, and the main points to take from this study are as follows:

The idea of knowledge being decontextualized, and presented in a new context, wherein Shannon was reducing information to yes or no questions, treating all messages as information (and again, where the transmission of information is the important part, the point being less about what is being transmitted and instead entirely about efficient transmission of information).

Thought provoking and groundbreaking, The Shallows is a must read for anyone who wants to learn about possible and likely side effects of our fascination and use of the latest tool for humankind, the internet.

“Net is best understood as the latest in a long series of tools that have helped mold the human mind

“[w]hen we outsource part of our memory to a machine, we also outsource a very important part of our intellect and even our identity.”

The digital age, and the Internet in particular, have altered the way we think (distinctly not done by Gleick’s human agency, but instead by the coldness of the machine). And though he never states it explicitly, it is difficult to leave Carr’s book without the distinct feeling that this is a bad thing.

th authors agree that the information age has led to a chaos. Information is everywhere. No longer left to oral tradition or to the written page, information is available to us instantaneously, overwhelming and all-consuming

Once again,” writes James Gleick, “as in the first days of the telegraph, we speak of annihilation of space and time.

Am I learning less by not reading the whole book? Am I learning more by reading a broad range of short articles? These are some of the issues Carr and Gleick are trying to figure out. How does the internet impact and alter the process of collecting and learning new information?

he Shallows by Nicholas Carr dives into the topic of how our brains interact with the internet and if this interaction is positive or negative. James Gleick in The Information examines the evolution of how people are exposed to and process new information. Both of these books look at how the internet and its expansive amount of knowledge has had an impact on its users.

f you read online articles for work or fun this is the plugin for you, I promise. You can create groups within Hypothesis if you have a class or work group that wishes to peer review an article. You can go lone wolf and keep everything to your

How will this dissolution of the division of the self, as Carr might put it, directly lead to the collapse of human society, and in what way? Will this collapse happen swiftly, or take many decades or perhaps even centuries to occur? Has it already begun?

Presuming that both authors are correct in their beliefs, is it prudent to assume that the study of information will become a moot intellectual pursuit due to the interconnectedness between the public and the personal?

For his argument is very much based on the existence of, á la Jürgen Habermas, the public and private spheres. Put simply, Carr argues that the far-reaching, everyday usage of the Internet by billions of people today has started to, and will continue to, bring about a dissolution of the divide between the “public self” and the “private self,” resulting in public matters becoming personal and vice-versa, although the former seems to be his major concern.

both in theory and in practice, over the past several decades has brought about a sort of “fatigue, anxiety, and glut,” (11) an overall negative sentiment towards understanding information in recent years.

I found Gleick much more intellectually acceptable in terms of what he was saying

And if everything is represented as symbols, meaning and knowledge will take a back seat. 

These books together seem to make a more complete book.

The idea that their algorithms control how so much of society gathers information is off-putting and Carr has underscored these sentiments.

As discussed in class- Carr believes that there is an impending crisis of democracy itself, due to the incline of the divided sense of self, all brought on by our obsession with the internet.

Overall, Gleick’s overabundance of technical detail doesn’t support his authorial claims that more information is more advantageous to all. Although, his positivist stance on our information laden society is a refreshing counter argument to more alarmist claims. Perhaps his sentiments could be better conveyed if he himself pared down his own account of information

Much like in history, medicine, he said, is about to go through a technology-driven transition.

Do the fruits of this publicly supported scholarship belong to the public? Should the public have free access to it

The use of digital sources, in other words, completely changes the landscape of information and transaction costs that historians have traditionally faced

Turkel: I'm occasionally dismayed to meet people who describe themselves as digital humanists but don't do any programming. (I can't help but think of Jack Gladney in Don DeLillo's novel White Noise, who practically invented the field of Hitler studies but doesn't speak any German.)16 It's important not to lose sight of the historical or historiographical relevance of our work, but it's also essential to master some of the technologies involved. Architects, to use Roy and Dan's example, have to know a fair amount about plumbing. Unless humanists have a hand in its creation, they are unlikely to be the beneficiaries of software that is sensitive to their needs.

Apart from shifts in training, there are possible changes in the way scholarship is published and disseminated. It seems likely that open access to scholarship will become much more common (perhaps encouraged by requirements that publicly funded research be openly published online).

What is the role of journals (or academic publishing more broadly) in these new projects? How might journals embrace such projects? How might digital history change the publication and dissemination of scholarship (beyond the current model of putting the print online with a search engine)?

Within the next decade we will be able to generate a very accurate and complete database of every single use of the Bible in the Victorian era. Scholars will be able to take a comprehensive look at the use of the Book of Job or of the Old versus the New Testament across the entirety of Victorian publications. Will this affect our understanding of Victorian religion and culture

There has been a great deal of hand-wringing about what will happen to our time-honored traditions of peer review, vetted publishing, promotion, and tenure. But upon reflection the situation is not that complicated. Writing is writing, and reading is reading. Here's the Web, publish to it, find your audience, critique and debate, build your reputation for being an expert in your area of study

With the exception of one of my books, I have given away everything I've written. And for nearly fifteen years at chnm, it has been a core value that we provide open and free access to all of our archives, publications, Web sites, and software.

Although historians in academe have largely continued to produce scholarship without engaging these groups, we are already seeing whole subdomains of specialized knowledge and original sources take shape on the Web and become the de facto source archives for historians to consult. At the very least academic historians will soon be referring to this scholarship in their notes or citations.

Thomas: In a 1998 national survey by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, respondents indicated a preference for unmediated history. Although they trusted college professors as experts, Americans expressed a strong preference for the direct experience that museums seemed to offer. Roy Rosenzweig noted that people “preferred to make their own histories.” Certainly, the Web and virtual environments have allowed unprecedented access to the materials of the past and reinvigorated history on any number of levels

We understand from market research that visitors to museums comprehend a concept in more depth when the spaces they are in emulate the reality of the situation

I suspect there may be a similar dialectic need and opportunity in digital history, where the McLuhanesque evangelism of a transformative new medium is only beginning to connect to the practice of history (whether in production, training, or consumption/distribution).

My priority is to help train a generation of programming historians. I acknowledge the wonderful work that my colleagues are doing by presenting history on the Web and by building digital tools for people who can't build their own. I know that the investment of time and energy that programming requires will make sense only for one historian in a hundred.

Paula Petrik's statement strikes me as exactly right. Just because students have grown up with a technology does not mean that they understand anything about it. Students are users, as a general rule, and not producers, but if our next generation of historians are going to have a voice in this medium, they will need to be producers.

Now services like Google Custom Search, Yahoo Pipes, and Rollyo make it simpler to, say, create a site that scans all resources about the French Revolution, without knowing anything about databases, spiders, or Web applications.

Every year it becomes easier and easier to do digital history, and so some of the concerns mentioned above will disappear. Even once-complex pieces of digital history are becoming simpler

Second, picking up on Will Thomas's interesting discussion, I think the difficulties students have also stem in part from the fact that we are asking them to make a huge conceptual shift in how they think about history. The traditional chronological or thematic narratives of history are so deeply entrenched in their minds—and, frankly, in most of our minds—that it is very difficult to start thinking of creating history that is not so linear and is “participatory” or “interactive

But I also think that the acquisition of these skills has been a significant barrier to many historians, keeping them from becoming producers of digital history. It may seem intimidating or too time-consuming or too disorienting.

By digital history all I mean is the use of computers.

: visualization and spatial history are not about producing illustrations or maps to communicate things that you have discovered by other means. It is a means of doing research; it generates questions that might otherwise go unasked, it reveals historical relations that might otherwise go unnoticed, and it undermines, or substantiates, stories upon which we build our own versions of the past.

Figure 2. Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns

Space is itself historical

Digital history allows the exploitation of kinds of evidence and data bases that would be too opaque or too unwieldy to use without computers

That such racial contests for space took place within Harlem made me pay more attention to the white places in what I had thought of as simply a black neighborhood

As Trevor Harris, Jesse Rouse, and Susan Bergeron argue, “The visual display of information creates a visceral connection to the content that goes beyond what is possible through traditional text documents

Howwerewordsdistributedacrossgenre?Whatchangeswhenyoumeasuretextinsteadof‘books’?

eneedtoinsistthattheresourcesouruniversitiespayfor,andthejournalsweallreviewforandedit,risetothechallengeofthedigital

CreatingthisnewinfiniteeditionoftheWesternprintarchiveasanobjectofstudyinitsownrightandmappingthedistributionoflanguageacrossitssurfacewouldraisethecriticalstandardforhowwereadallkindsofevidence.

In1962,LouisMumfordobservedthat‘mindsundulyfascinatedbycomputerscarefullyconfinethemselvestoaskingonlythekindofquestionthatcomputerscananswer’.

Ihaveyettoseeapieceofacademichistorythatisexplicitaboutitsrelianceonkeywordsearchandelectronicsources.

WeusetheBurneyCollectionandGoogleBooksregardless,playingaformofresearchroulettedressedupastraditionalscholarship.

Buttodothatweneedtoengagemuchmoredirectlythanwehavesofarwiththetechnologieswearerapidlycomingtorelyupon.Atthemomentweareusingthemtomakeourliveseasier,whilepretendingthattheydonotexist.

hemetadatausedincreatingGoogleBooks,whicheffectivelymisrepresentswhatisthere.

IfyouuseanAdvancedGoogleBookSearchforthesubject‘history’,oreventhesuggestedexemplarsubjectlabel‘medievalhistory’,notasinglevolumethatisrecognizablyeither‘history’or‘medievalhistory’isreturnedonthefirstpage(medievalhistoryonlyreturnstworesultsoutofsevenmillionbooks)

Butamuchbiggerissueispoor‘metadata’.19Metadataisinformationaboutatextorwork,orawebpage.Theindexcardforabookfromaphysicalcardcatalogueismetadata:thetitle,theauthor,thepublisher,thedateofpublication,thenumberofpagesandsoon.Onlinemetadatacanincludefiletypes,measuresoftextualcomplexityandlanguage.Conceivably,itcouldalsoincludeotherinformation,suchashowmanypeoplehaveaccessedit,andwhatelsetheyhavedownloaded.Thedifficultyisthatifyougetthiswronginanonlineenvironment(justasmuchasinaphysicallibrary),youcannolongerfindthings.

ThefirstproblemisthatGoogleBookssuffersfromanissueofqualitycontrol.Thereareunreadablepages,pagesscannedinthewrongorderandpageswithbitsleftoffthatshortofaprogrammeofretrospectivecorrectionsbyGoogle(whichwillnothappen)willneverbefoundagain.

.Aslongaswepositivelyavoidanyattempttobuildthesearchprocessintohowwerepresentourscholarship,thisisfine.

Inotherwords,Google’sinnovationsmeanboththatresearchersareincreasinglybeingdirectedtobodiesofonlinematerialtheyhaveusedbeforeattheexpenseofawiderknowledgelandscapeand,moresignificantly,thattworesearchersareunlikelytofindthesameresultsreturnedfromthesamequery

EmbeddedwithintheDeweyDecimalandLibraryofCongresssystemsofclassification(andinalltheirlesssuccessfulimitators)arecleardisciplinaryboundarieswhichconstrainhowareaderimaginestheirtopicandtheintellectuallandscapethroughwhichtheynavigate.

My aim in this chapter has been to show that a topic model reveals disciplinary trends that would otherwise be prohibitively time consum-ing to document. Used alongside direct and collaborative reading, topic models have the potential to offer new perspectives on existing materials and novel accounts of the dynamics of intellectual history

HOWTO READ 22,198 JOURNAL ARTICLES 101proportions: 47  percent topic 25, 17  percent topic 19, and 9  percent topic 20 (with 27 percent distributed with smaller shares over the remain-ing 27 topics; fig. 3.5). The plurality of the words is associated with topic 25, which in turn is characterized by its assigning high probability to observing the following words: “women,” “female,” “woman,” “male,” “sexual,” “feminist,” “social,” “gender,” “family,” and “mother