Happy Words Trump Negativity in the English Language is an interesting story about a study by Kloumann and colleagues on Positivity of the English Language. They used Mechanical Turk to get people to assess whether the high frequency words used in Twitter, Books, the New York Times and Music Lyrics were positive. Their study showed that overwhelmingly English is a positive language. Thanks to Stan for this.
Dan Cohen has written a good summary of the latest fuss over electronic books, The Fight Over the Future of Digital Books. He explains the latest suit by the Authors Guild against the HathiTrust. This suit is the companion to the suit by the Authors Guild of Google that has still not been resolved.
At the inaugural Edmonton Pipelines meeting I’ve learned a lot about different spatial projects. Some include:
The Edmonton Pipelines project is SSHRC funded. They are interested in community engagement which is why they organized the inaugural meeting and invited researchers in the city doing work with geography. They chose the name “pipelines” to play with the idea of how data is changed over space. They have a number of subprojects including one on Queer Edmonton that I am interested in as we are working with Pipelines on a locative game that exposes people to the queer history of Edmonton.
Stan Ruecker gave a great talk today about Visualations in Time for the Humanities Computing Research Colloquium. He is leading a SSHRC funded project that builds on Drucker and Noviskie’s work on Temporal Modelling. (I should mention that I am on the project.) Stan started by talking about all the challenges to the linear visualization of time that you see in tools like Simile. They include:
Stan then showed a number of visual designs for these different ways of thinking about time. Some looked like rubber sheets, some like frameworks of cubes with things in them, and some like water droplets. Many of these avoided the “line” in the visualization of time.
CBC has a story about how Gamers’ discovery could generate anti-HIV drugs (Sept. 19, 2011). The story is about how players of Fold.It have solved a protein folding problem related to AIDS which has been recently published. (The paper is here.)
What is neat about this project is that it is an example of “citizen science” or crowdsourcing for research. Rather than use the computer to analyze the data, the computer/network was used to make it easier for humans to solve the problems. They turned protein folding into a game that enticed volunteers to play for science.
The final White Paper report on the Data Mining with Criminal Intent project is now up. This is thanks to Kirsten who did a lot of editing. Now we have to write better documentation and imagine papers.
The Guardian has an interesting visualization of Anders Breivik’s manifesto mapped by linkfluence. Andrew Brown explains what they learned from the visualization in an article Anders Breivik’s spider web of hate (Sept. 7, 2011). The visualization shows the network of links from Breivik’s manifesto to other types of sites. There are a large number of links to mainstream media and to the Wikipedia, but also a number to other right wing sites. As Brown puts it,
The Guardian has analysed the webpages he links to, and the pages that these in turn link to, in order to expose a spider web of hatred based around three “counter-jihad” sites, two run by American rightwingers, and one by an eccentric Norwegian. All of these draw some of their inspiration from the Egyptian Jewish exile Gisele Littman, who writes under the name of Bat Ye’or, and who believes that the European elites have conspired against their people to hand the continent over to Muslims.
Stan pointed me to a nice essay that uses the definitions of humanities computing we gathered as part of the Day of DH project. Frederick Gibbs analyzed the short definitions in his blog essay, digital humanities definitions by type. He boils the definitions down to the following (the number is his count as to how many definitions fit that category):
55 – variation on “the application of technology to humanities work”
22 – working with digital media or a digital environment
15 – minimize the difference between DH and humanities
12 – umbrella or blanket nature of DH label; issues that humanists now face
12 – using digital AND studying digital
12 – refusals to define the term
10 – methods AND community
9 – digitization / archives
9 – studying the digital
I think he more or less has it right. I’m not sure where he put mine, but I’m of the “using digital AND studying digital”. I believe the reflectivity or doubling of using and studying what you use is what makes this a humanities discipline.
Stéfan pointed me to a ComputerWorld article by Sharon Machlis about 22 free tools for data visualization and analysis. This covers tools from
Google Refine which you use to clean up data to Exhibit, a MIT Simile Project spin-off designed to help you integrate visualizations.
Megan pointed me to the ADay of Archaeology project. This project was conceived of during one of our Day of Digital Humanities projects and builds on the idea. It serves partly as community outreach for archaeology:
The Day of Archaeology 2011 aims to give a window into the daily lives of archaeologists. Written by over 400 contributors, it chronicles what they did on one day, July 29th 2011, from those in the field through to specialists working in laboratories and behind computers. This date coincides with the Festival of British Archaeology, which runs from 16th – 31st July 2011.
I also note that they had far more participants in their first year than we had even in our third! We need to learn from them.