methodology
Chaperoning Words
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Sanders, Joe Sutliff. “Chaperoning Words: Meaning-Making in Comics and Picture Books.” Children’s Literature: 57-90. Web.
Referrer: Chris Vitale
Categories: picturebooks, comics, visual storytelling, methodology, image/text
Annotation:
Sanders is making the argument that comic book study and picture book study are intertwined. In this lengthy paper, we are introduced to a methodology for determining the difference and meaning between the messages and forms of these two genres. Theory is a difficult thing to apply to comics and picturebooks according to Sanders. Instead he proposes the notation of the obvious differences among the two forms in order find a solution to his defined problem. Sanders states, “if they have even the dimmest awareness of the impact of shape, line, color, and pacing (and I suspect they have quite a cunning awareness of a wide range of aesthetics), they are chaperoning key elements themselves.” Sanders section entitled “Fixing Meaning” is particularly important for it’s treatement of the word and image dynamic in these forms of literature. The two genres combine words in a fundamentally similar way. The major takeaway is as follows: “in general, if the book anticipates a solitary reader who chaperones the words as they go about their work of fixing the meaning of the images, that book is a comic; if the book instead anticipates a reader who chaperones the words as they are communicated to a listening reader, that book is a picture book.”
Graphs, Maps, Trees
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. Paperback ed. London: Verso, 2007. Print.
Referrer: Matt Gold
Categories: digital humanities, distant reading, data visualization, historiography, methodology
Annotation:
This essential piece of the Digital Humanities canon outlines the efforts of Franco Moretti and his team in their journey to distant read the literary work produced over a few centuries. Graphs, maps and trees are shown to be valuable tools for literary scholars, like their natural and social sciences counterparts. The concept of distant reading, application of an analytics and quantification driven approach to reading wide ranges of texts was groundbreaking for the literary community. This historiography of the literary canon illustrates the merit and value of distant reading as a legitimate methodology. Acting as a roadmap for how quantification and visualization can augment, complement, and completely topple traditional research methodologies, this text is a fundamental piece of this Picturebooks project.
Computational historiography
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Mimno, David. “Computational historiography: Data mining in a century of classics journals” Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) 5(1), 2012
Referrer: Scott Dexter
Categories: digital humanities, distant reading, data mining, computer science, methodology
Annotation:
David Mimno follows in Franco Moretti’s footsteps in an effort to data mine a massive archive of classics jorunals. This distant reading is the preferred methodology for Mimno who has identified the ability close read such a wide array of documents as unrealistic. The paper discusses the use of computational tools that allow for the statistical analysis of the corpus. The work is explicitly complimentary to traditional scholarship. The collection that Mimno is working with has been OCR-ed from over twenty classical philology and archaeology journals. Outlining the tools used in statistically driven mining of texts, Mimno discusses tokenization, removal of stopwords, word distance and divergence, and topic modeling. The algorithmic representations of these computational methods are given as well as an introductory discussion of the ways they work and are used. Finally, Mimno presents his findings in the forms of graphics, topic models, and observations.
Significant Themes in 19th-Century Literature
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Jockers, Matthew and David Mimno, “Significant Themes in 19th-Century Literature” Poetics 41(6):750–769, 2013
Referrer: Scott Dexter
Categories: digital humanities, distant reading, data mining, computer science, methodology
Annotation:
Matthew Jockers and David Mimno discuss their distant reading project regarding the themes of 19th century literature. To do so, the two researchers mine and model topics from over 3,300 works of literature. The literature encompasses British, American, and Irish texts. Taking a variety of other factors into consideration the two seek to find trends in the themes of novels from that century. The methodology used incorporates counting words, tokenization as well as topic modeling. The tool Mallet is used by the researchers as the main engine for mining the text. Jockers and Mimno discuss the preprocessing elements (stopword removal, Bag of Words segmenting of the text, part of speech tagging of nouns, and modeling of the topics). Finally, the analysis and observations are given. Topic modeling is shown to be a scalable solution for those interested in reading massive selections of hundreds and thousands of books.
The Digital Humanities Unveiled
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Spratt, Emily L. “The Digital Humanities Unveiled: Perceptions Held by Art Historians and Computer Scientists about Computer Vision Technology” (Self Published).
Referrer: Scott Dexter
Categories: digital humanities, distant reading, data mining, computer vision, art, art history, computer science, methodology
Annotation:
This paper outlines a survey completed by both art historians and computer scientists in relation to a computers ability to interpret aesthetic and beauty. The value of this work lies in the responses of this survey. Computer vision is rapidly becoming a more accepted and accessible method of examining art. For art historians and computer scientists, the implications are obvious. This digital humanities project used, “twenty-one questions for art historians and sixteen for computer scientists that were intended to shed light on field members’ knowledge of the capabilities and applications of computer vision technology, attitudes and perceptions about the use of it, and reactions to the meaning of this type of digitization in the humanities.” Spratt discusses the positive and negative reactions to computer vision’s ability to detect and automatically recognize aesthetic experiences of beauty. Channeling philosophy, Spratt defines what these variables mean for her survey.
