Marti Hearst (School of Information) and Bryan Wagner (English) will discuss their National Endowment for the Humanities funded WordSeer project. They will be joined by Ph.D. candidate Aditi Muralidharan (EECS), whose initial research, asking how natural language processing and data visualization could be applied to the process of literary study, began the project. Two years and two NEH grants later, the team has expanded their goal from matching up computational linguistics algorithms with literary questions to the creation of a publicly available scholarly tool for the visual and algorithmic analysis of text. They will discuss lessons learned and the close collaboration, field- testing and detailed understanding of humanistic work processes that are necessary for tool builders to be successful.
Small plates and refreshments will be provided.
