Weekly Calendar


1: Introduction to DH Text Analysis

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Classwork and Reminders:

Discussion of Policies and Major Course Themes ... Read More

Discussion of Two Recent Perspectives on Digital Humanities ... Read More

Text Analysis Methods Workshop: Getting Started with Python, Git, and Github ... Read More

Slides for Week 1 ... Read More

HOMEWORK (in addition to readings): Create and Share Box.com Folder ... Read More

2: Do Computational Methods Find Stereotypes or Make Them?

Thursday, September 06, 2018

Today's Readings:

Jockers, Matthew, and Gabi Kiriloff. "Understanding Gender and Character Agency in the 19th Century Novel," The Journal of Cultural Analytics. Montreal, December, 2016. n.p. [Link]

Liu, Alan. "The Meaning of the Digital Humanities," PMLA. Vol. 128, No. 2, 2013. 409-423. [Link]

Mandell, Laura. "Gendering Digital Literary History: What Counts for Digital Humanities," A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Malden, John Wiley & Sons, 2016. 588-602. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Sign-up Sheet for Class Discussion Facilitators ... Read More

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 2: Using a Jupyter Notebook, Basic Python, an Example Script ... Read More

3: Are Topic Models Unobtrusive Measures?

Thursday, September 13, 2018

Today's Readings:

Brett, Megan R. "Topic Modeling: A Basic Introduction," Journal of Digital Humanities. Vol. 2, No. 1, 2012. n.p. [Link]

Schmidt, Ben. "Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities," Journal of Digital Humanities. Vol. 2, No. 1, 2012. n.p. [Link]

Weingart, Scott B., and Elijah Meeks. "The Digital Humanities Contribution to Topic Modeling," Journal of Digital Humanities. Vol. 2 Winter, No. 1, 2012. n.p. [Link]

Recommended but Not Required: Underwood, Ted, and Andrew Goldstone. "The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us," New Literary History. Volume 45, Number 3, Summer 2014 . 359-384. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Guest Speaker: Scott Weingart ... Read More

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 3: Python Fundamentals continued ... Read More

4: How Does a Prototype Argue?

Thursday, September 20, 2018

Today's Readings:

Drucker, Johanna. "Chapter Excerpt," Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge. Cambridge, MA, Harvard UP, 2014. 125-137. [Link]

D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. "Feminist Data Visualization," IEEE VIS Conference. Baltimore, October, 2016. 1-5. [Link]

Galey, Alan, and Stan Ruecker. "How a Prototype Argues," Literary and Linguistic Computing. Vol. 25, No. 4, 2010. 405-424. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Guest Speaker: Alison Langmead ... Read More

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 4: Basics of Text Processing ... Read More

5: Is Computational Text Analysis a Subset of Logical Positivism?

Monday, September 24, 2018

Classwork and Reminders:

Turn in DH Code Analysis ... Read More

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Today's Readings:

Ramsay, Stephen. "The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or, What You do with a Million Books," Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology. Ann Arbor, U of Michigan P, 2010. 111-120. [Link]

van Zundert, Joris J. "Screwmeneutics and Hermenumericals: The Computationality of Hermeneutics," A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Malden, John Wiley & Sons, 2016. 331-347. [Link]

Recommended but Not Required: Zalta, Edward N. et. al., eds. "Logical Empiricism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, First published April 4, 2011, substantive revision April 5, 2017. n.p. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 5: Part-of-Speech Tagging and Named Entity Recognition ... Read More

6: Are the Rhetorics of Validity and Soundness Incompatible with the Humanities?

Thursday, October 04, 2018

Today's Readings:

Archer, Dawn. "Data Mining and Word Frequency Analysis," Research Methods for Reading Digital Data in the Digital Humanities. Edinburgh, U of Edinburgh P, 2016. 72-92. [Link]

Ignatow, Gabe, and Rada Mihalcea. "The Philosophy and Logic of Text Mining" and "Research Design and Basic Tools," An Introduction to Text Mining: Research Design, Data Collection, and Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 2018. 41-55 and 59-73. [Link]

Piper, Andrew. "There Will be Numbers," The Journal of Cultural Analytics. Montreal, May, 2016. n.p. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 6: Working with Corpora and Datasets ... Read More

7: Are Close Reading and Distant Reading Equivalent?

Monday, October 8, 2018

Classwork and Reminders:

Turn in Proposal for Final Paper Assignment ... Read More

Thursday, October 11, 2018

Today's Readings:

Bode, Katherine. "The Equivalence of 'Close' And 'Distant' Reading; Or, toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History," Modern Language Quarterly. Vol. 78, No. 1, 2017. 77-106. [Link]

Long, Hoyt, and Richard Jean So. "Literary Pattern Recognition: Modernism between Close Reading and Machine Learning," Critical Inquiry. Volume 42, Number 2, Winter 2016. 235-267. [Link]

Recommended but Not Required: Argamon, Shlomo, et. al. "Vive la Différence! Text Mining Gender Difference in French Literature," Digital Humanities Quarterly. Vol. 3, No. 2, 2009. n.p. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Guest Speaker: Tatyana Gershkovich ... Read More

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 7: Dictionaries and Lexicons ... Read More

Discussion of Research Proposals ... Read More

8: What Are the Hermeneutic Implications of Text Processing Methods?

Thursday, October 18, 2018

Today's Readings:

Bamman, David, Sabrina Lee, and Ted Underwood. "The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction," The Journal of Cultural Analytics. Montreal, February, 2018. n.p. [Link]

Drucker, Johanna. "Why Distant Reading Isn’t," PMLA. Vol. 132, No. 3, 2017. 628-635. [Link]

Piper, Andrew. "Think Small: On Literary Modeling," PMLA. Vol. 132, No. 3, 2017. 651-658. [Link]

Recommended but Not Required: Beckman, Milo. "These Are The Phrases Each GOP Candidate Repeats Most," FiveThirtyEight. 2016 Election, March 10, 2016. n.p. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 8: Levenshtein distance and fuzzy matching ... Read More

9: Is Style the Answer to Everything?

Thursday, October 25, 2018

Today's Readings:

Allison, Sarah et. al. "Style at the Scale of the Sentence," Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlet 5. Stanford, June, 2013. 1-30. [Link]

Blatt, Ben. "He Wrote, She Wrote," Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2017. 31-58. [Link]

Wadsworth, Fabian B., Jérémie Vasseur, and David E. Damby. "Evolution of Vocabulary in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath," Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Vol. 32, No. 1, September 2017. 660–671. [Link]

Recommended but Not Required: Holmes, David. "The Evolution of Stylometry in Humanities Scholarship," Literary and Linguistic Computing. Vol. 13, Issue 3, 1998. 111–117. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 9: Collocations and N-grams ... Read More

10: Can We Study the Canon without Remaking It?

Monday, October 29, 2018

Classwork and Reminders:

Turn in Text Corpus for Final Paper Assignment ... Read More

Thursday, November 01, 2018

Today's Readings:

Algee-Hewitt, Mark, and Mark McGurl. "Between Canon and Corpus: Six Perspectives on 20th-Century Novels," Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlet 8. Stanford, January, 2015. 1-29. [Link]

Bode, Katherine. "Thousands of Titles Without Authors: Digitized Newspapers, Serial Fiction, and the Challenges of Anonymity," Book History. Vol. 19, No. 1, 2016. 284-316. [Link]

Clement, Tanya E. "'A thing not beginning and not ending': Using Digital Tools to Distant Read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans," Literary and Linguistic Computing. Vol. 23, No. 3, September 2008 . 361–81. [Link]

Recommended but Not Required: Parrish, Allison. "The Average Novel," NaNoGenMo2017. Github, November, 2017. n.p. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 10: The vector space model and cosine similarity ... Read More

11: How Do Genres (and Other Categories) Work?

Thursday, November 08, 2018

Today's Readings:

Isaac, Jessica. "Graphing the Archives of Nineteenth-Century Amateur Newspapers," Book History. Vol. 19, No. 1, 2016. 317-348. [Link]

Underwood, Ted. "The Life Cycles of Genres," The Journal of Cultural Analytics. Montreal, May, 2016. n.p. [Link]

Recommended but Not Required: Piper, Andrew. "Fictionality," The Journal of Cultural Analytics. Montreal, December, 2016. n.p. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 11: TF-IDF and clustering ... Read More

12: Are Automatically Extracted Textual Features Valid Objects of Study?

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Today's Readings:

Reagan, Andrew J., et. al. "The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes," EPJ Data Science. Vol. 5, Issue 31, 2016. 1-10. [Link]

Tatlock, Lynne et. al. "Crossing Over: Gendered Reading Formations at the Muncie Public Library, 1891-1902," The Journal of Cultural Analytics. Montreal, March, 2018. n.p. [Link]

Recommended but Not Required: Heuser, Ryan, Franco Moretti, Eric Steiner. "The Emotions of London," Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlet 13. Stanford, October, 2016. 1-10. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 12: Topic Models and Word2vec ... Read More

13: What Are You Thankful For? (Thanksgiving Break)

Monday, November 19, 2018

Classwork and Reminders:

Turn in Initial Results for Final Paper Assignment ... Read More

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Classwork and Reminders:

No Class -- Thanksgiving Break ... Read More

14: Why Are Weak Ties So Strong?

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Today's Readings:

Edmondson, Chloe. "An Enlightenment Utopia: The Network of Sociability in Corinne," Digital Humanities Quarterly. Vol. 11, No. 2, 2017. n.p.. [Link]

Warren, Christopher, et. al. "Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A Statistical Method for Reconstructing Large Historical Social Networks," Digital Humanities Quarterly. Vol. 10, No. 3, October 2016. n.p. [Link]

Recommended but Not Required: Granovetter, Mark S. "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology. Volume 78, Number 6, May 1973. 1360-1380. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 14: Machine learning classification (linear and logistic regression) ... Read More

15: Can Computational Text Analysis and Embrace Intersectionality?

Thursday, December 06, 2018

Today's Readings:

Earhart, Amy. "Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon," Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 309-318. [Link]

Risam, Roopika. "Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities," Digital Humanities Quarterly. Vol. 9, No. 2, 2015. n.p. [Link]

Recommended but Not Required: Wernimont, Jacqueline. "Whence Feminism? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital Literary Archives," Digital Humanities Quarterly. Vol. 7, No. 1, 2013. n.p. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Text Analysis Methods Workshop 15: Network analysis and visualization ... Read More

16: How Can We Compute the Visual Page?

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Today's Readings:

Canceled: Houston, Natalie M. "Reading the Visual Page in the Digital Archive," Research Methods for Reading Digital Data in the Digital Humanities. Edinburgh, U of Edinburgh P, 2016. 36-50. [Link]

Canceled: Trettien, Whitney. "A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: The Case of Eng/ish Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica," Digital Humanities Quarterly. Vol. 7, No. 1, 2013. n.p. [Link]

Classwork and Reminders:

Reminder: Class Cancelled ... Final Papers Due by End of Day ... Read More

Instructor:

Matthew Lavin

Office:

433 Cathedral

Office Hours:

10:30-12:30, Mon + Wed, or by appt

Email:

lavin@pitt.edu