Category: Methods

The Index Thomisticus as Project

This is a story from early in the technological revolution, when the application was out searching for the hardware, from a time before the Internet, a time before the PC, before the chip, before the mainframe. From a time even before programming itself. (Winter 1999, 3)

Introduction

Father Busa is rightly honoured as one of the first humanists to use computing for a humanities research task. He is considered the founder of humanities computing for his innovative application of information technology and for the considerable influence of his project and methods, not to mention his generosity to others. He did not only work out how use the information technology of the late 1940s and 1950s, but he pioneered a relationship with IBM around language engineering and with their support generously shared his knowledge widely. Ironically, while we have all heard his name and the origin story of his research into presence in Aquinas, we know relatively little about what actually occupied his time – the planning and implementation of what was for its time one of the major research computing projects, the Index Thomsticus.

This blog essay is an attempt to outline some of the features of the Index Thomisticus as a large-scale information technology project as a way of opening a discussion on the historiography of computing in the humanities. This essay follows from a two-day visit to the Busa Archives at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. This visit was made possible by Marco Carlo Passarotti who directs the “Index Thomisticus” Treebank project in CIRCSE (Centro Interdisciplinare di Ricerche per la Computerizzazione dei Segni dell’Espressione – Interdisciplinary Centre for Research into the Computerization of Expressive Signs) which evolved out of GIRCSE (Gruppo not Centro – or Group not Centre), the group that Father Busa helped form in the 1980s. Passarotti not only introduced me to the archives, he also helped correct this blog as he is himself an archive of stories and details. Growing up in Gallarate, his family knew Busa, he studied under Busa, he took over the project, and he is one of the few who can read Busa’s handwriting.

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Original GIRCSE Plaque kept by Passarotti

Continue reading The Index Thomisticus as Project

Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails in Secret Security Sweep

The Intercept and CBC have been collaborating on stories based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. One recent story is about how Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails in Secret Security Sweep. CSE is collecting email going to the government and flagging suspect emails for analysts.

An earlier story titled CSE’s Levitation project: Expert says spy agencies ‘drowning in data’ and unable to follow leads, tells about the LEVITATION project that monitors file uploads to free file hosting sites. The idea is to identify questionable uploads and then to figure out who is uploading the materials.

Glenn Greenwald (see the embedded video) questions the value of this sort of mass surveillance. He suggests that mass surveillance impedes the ability to find terrorists attacks. The problem is not getting more information, but connecting the dots of what one has. In fact the slides that you can get to from these stories both show that CSE is struggling with too much information and analytical challenges.

My Very Own Voyant Workshop

Stéfan Sinclair and I just finished a workshop on My Very Own Voyant. The workshop focused on how to run VoyantServer on your local machine. This allows you to run Voyant locally. There are all sorts of reasons to run locally:

  • It runs faster
  • You can upload large texts faster
  • It can process larger text corpora
  • You can control the server
  • You can keep your corpora confidential

You can download VoyantServer and read instructions here.

The Isolator, A Bizarre Helmet For Encouraging Concentration (1925)

From Geoff I learned about The Isolator, A Bizarre Helmet For Encouraging Concentration (1925). The Isolator was developed in 1925 by Hugo Gernsback a science fiction pioneer (and editor of Science and Invention magazine.) The idea is to force you to focus on your writing (with lots of oxygen.)

One wonders if it works? Could it be even more useful now?

Front Row to Fashion Week – NYTimes.com

The New York Times has an interesting way of visualizing fashion that you can see in their article Front Row to Fashion Week – Interactive Feature. They have abstracted the colour hues to create small swatches of different designers who showed at the New York Fashion Week. These “sparklines” or sparkboxes are an interesting way to compare the shows by designers.

Social Digital Scholarly Editing

On July 11th and 12th I was at a conference in Saskatoon on Social Digital Scholarly Editing. This conference was organized by Peter Robinson and colleagues at the University of Saskatchewan. I kept conference notes here.

I gave a paper on “Social Texts and Social Tools.” My paper argued for text analysis tools as a “reader” of editions. I took the extreme case of big data text mining and what scraping/mining tools want in a text and don’t want in a text. I took this extreme view to challenge the scholarly editing view that the more interpretation you put into an edition the better. Big data wants to automate the process of gathering and mining texts – big data wants “clean” texts that don’t have markup, annotations, metadata and other interventions that can’t be easily removed. The variety of markup in digital humanities projects makes it very hard to clean them.

The response was appreciative of the provocation, but (thankfully) not convinced that big data was the audience of scholarly editors.

Tool Discourse

Character Density by Year in Tool DiscourseWe are finally getting results in a long slow process of trying to study tool discourse in the digital humanities. Amy Dyrbe and Ryan Chartier are building a corpus of discourse around tools that includes tool reviews, articles about what people are doing with tools, web pages about tools and so on. We took the first coherent chunk and Ryan has been analyzing it with R. The graph above shows which years have the most characters. My hypothesis was that tool reviews and discourse dropped off in the 1990s as the web became more important. This seems to be wrong.

Here are the high-frequency words (with stop words removed). Note the modal verbs “can”, “will”, and “may.” They indicate the potentiality of tools.

“can” 2305
“one” 1996
“text” 1940
“word” 1931
“words” 1859
“program” 1606
“ii” 1514 (Not sure why)
“will” 1361
“language” 1307
“data” 1285
“two” 1188
“system” 1183
“computer” 1116
“used” 1115
“use” 942
“user” 939
“file” 890
“first” 870
“may” 853
“also” 837

Globalization Compendium Archive

I have been working for a while on archiving the Globalization Compendium which I worked on. Yesterday I got it archived in two Institutional Repositories:

In both cases there is a Zip of a BagIt bag with the XML files, code and other documentation from the site. My first major deposit.

Old Bailey Trials Are Tabulated for Scholars Online

The New York Times now has an article on the Criminal Intent project I was part of. See, Old Bailey Trials Are Tabulated for Scholars Online. They quote a historian who is sceptical of the results of mining, though he appreciates the resource.

“The Old Bailey Online project has done a great service in making those sources widely (and costlessly) available,” Mr. Langbein wrote in an e-mail. But he complained that the claims about data mining have “a breathless quality: ‘you can expect big things from us,’ but as yet it’s all method and no results.” He said that the new findings belittle the work of a generation of scholars who focused on the 18th century as the turning point in the evolution of the criminal justice system.

Alas, he seems didn’t read our report, but the summary in the Chronicle. It is easy to use cute phrases like “breathless quality”, but is he right? Time will tell, but I think the historians on our team have backed up the results found with mining and they never belittled the work of previous scholars – we saw ourselves building on it.

What can mining do? I think mining can give you a big picture so that you see the forest rather than trees in a way that no one could before. Conclusions about the shape of the forest have to be checked against other evidence, but the results of mining is evidence that is not breathless even if it takes your breath away. As Bill Turkel put it,

Mr. Turkel, who developed some of the digital tools, said that data mining reveals unexpected trends and connections that no one would have thought to look for before. Previous scholars “tended to cherry-pick anecdotes without having a sense that it was possible to measure all of that text and treat the whole archive as a single unit,” he said.

Of course, if you then leverage traditional evidence to buttress your argument then the mining is forgotten or trivialized.

Turkel: A research workflow with off-the-shelf tools

I had heard about Bill Turkel’s ‘super secret’ project and how he had decided to keep the idea of the project secret but share the method, which is the opposite of what we usually do. As I am not on research leave (sabbatical) and working on 5 books (ha!) I thought I should learn from Bill. Here is the link to his excellent research workflow, How To « William J Turkel. What I like is that it is all stuff you can do with off-the-shelf tools, though not necessarily free ones.