Class 8 Notes
Preliminary Class Business
- No class next Tuesday
- Transcriptions Research Slam, "SynchDH" (May 8th)
1. Thinking Ahead to the Class Project
- Unless we come to a decision today about a corpus, for the next class each student (or pairs or groups of students working in collaboration) should come up with an idea for a corpus of works we can study. The criteria for a good corpus include some combination of the following features:
- The corpus should have scale. (The corpus doesn't have to be gigantic, but there should be enough works to make it sensible to use digital humanities methods to study them--say, at least 20 works at a minimum.)
- The corpus should be accessible.
- Ideally the works would be out of copyright or otherwise in the public domain.
- Ideally, we can get digital versions of the works fairly easily, so we don't have to spend a lot of time on that.
- The corpus should have some balance between consistency (e.g., a focus on works of a certain kind from a certain period) and differentiation. (E.g., the corpus could sub-types of works that can be compared, or it can be compared as a whole to another corpus of some sort.)
- Hopefully, the corpus should include works or issues that interest you.
- Continued class discussion of ideas about a corpus to study:
- Ideas mentioned so far:
- Corpus [TBD] -- topic model analysis and comparison
- E.g., Study the 19th-century novels we have and compare novels by women, men, and anonymous.
- Corpus of translations --
- Some possible suggestions from the instructor:
- Study a small set of modern "dystopian" novels if we can get them in digital form; then use text analysis and topic modeling methods to find the nearest matches in the 19th-century corpus of novels.
- Study a corpus where it makes sense to use both topic modeling and social network analysis.
2. Social Network Analysis
Readings for today
- Wikipedia article on "Social Networks"
- Stephen P. Borgatti,, et al. (2009), "Network Analysis in the Social Sciences" [PDF] [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
- Marten Düring, "Social Network Analysis for Humanists Cheat Sheet" (2015)
- Franco Moretti, "Network Theory, Plot Analysis," Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlet #2 (2011)
- Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), pp. 35-64
3. More on the Social Network Paradigm
4. Mapping in the Digital Humanities