D-Lab coordinates and collaborates with the Townsend Center's working group on the Digital Humanities, an interdisciplinary group focused on the application of digital methods and computing technologies to humanities research. The goal of the Digital Humanities working group is to provide a way for all the digital humanities groups on campus to unite with each other, keep each other abreast of current trends and new methods, and exchange ideas.
We welcome all interested parties, whether you are in the humanities, the social sciences, or any discipline that has an interest in technologically-motivated study of the human sciences.
Refreshments will be provided.
Schedule
Our meeting schedule for the semester is as follows:
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- Monday, 2/3, 1pm-2pm – Network Analysis (Hands-on Brief Intro to Gephi)
- Wednesday, 2/26, 12pm-2pm – Lunch with Robert Nelson, Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab @ the University of Richmond [RSVP]
- Monday, 3/3, 1pm-2pm - MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)
- Monday, 3/31, 1pm-2pm – The Radical Politics of DH: Collaboration and Open-Source
- Monday, 4/28, 1pm-2pm – California Digital Library
- Tuesday, 5/13, 4pm-6pm – End of the Year Social Hour, Beta Lounge
Semester Events (things to look out for)
Information Visualization MOOC - Starting January 28!
Please join the Digital Humanities Working Group and the Social Sciences D-Lab for the INFOVIZ MOOC from Indiana University. We'll be meeting every Tuesday afternoon to watch the MOOC videos and work on questions together. More information (including registration information) can be found at
http://ivmooc.cns.iu.edu/. The course starts on January 28.
If you would like to attend, please do the following two steps
Guest Lecture: Computing and the Practice of History
Topic Modeling and Textual Analysis of the Civil War
February 27, 4pm - 6pm
Maude Fife (315 Wheeler Hall)
Reception to follow at D-Lab (356 Barrows Hall)
Robert Nelson will explore the instrumental functions of nationalistic and patriotic rhetoric during the Civil War. Using an innovative text-mining technique called topic modeling to analyze the entire runs of the Richmond Daily Dispatch and the New York Times during the war, it will suggest that the two newspaper used the same language of patriotism and nationalism but to different ends: the former to draw men into the army, the latter to draw voters to the polls to support the Republican Party. The talk will also more broadly reflect upon the methodological value of topic modeling, suggesting how cultural and intellectual historians can use the technique to interpret the concrete political, social, and emotional functions of elusive ideological discourses.
About the speaker:
Dr. Robert K. Nelson is the director of the Digital Scholarship Lab. His current research uses a text-mining technique called topic modeling to uncover themes and reveal historical patterns in massive amounts of text from the Civil War era. He is currently completing two projects from this research. One is a digital project that will publish and analyze multiple topic models of Civil War-era archives including the Richmond Daily Dispatch and the New York Times. The other is an essay that analyzes these models to produce a comparative analysis of Union and Confederate nationalism and patriotism.
As always, if you'd have an idea for a topic or know about an event on campus, please let us know!
This working group is funded by the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley.
