Video: This is a video of my contribution to the workshop 'The Frontiers of DH: Humanities Systems Infrastructure', presented by the UC Digital Humanities Programme during November 2015. See also Prof. Paul Arthur: Smart Infrastructures for Cultural and Social Research, Prof. Alan Liu: Against the Cultural Singularity, and (earlier in the month) Dr. Tim Sherratt: Towards A Manifesto for Tactical DH Research Infrastructure.
https://www.mashape.com/ offers Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that perform common text analysis tasks, including the one we’ll use for this tutorial: Named Entity Recognition (NER). Text analysis is a good way to introduce students to data mining. You can use text documents, or a URL.
This post was first published at ideasunderground.com on 24 May, 2009. I’ve reproduced it here partly because that blog no longer exists, partly because it’s a lazy-but-efficient way of offering an idea I’ve been mulling over for some time to a new audience, and partly because I’m (sadly, perhaps) still quite taken with it. It fits well with my belief that scholars – especially in a post Edward Snowden world – need to understand the engineered nature of the virtualmachines they use in their work (regardless of whether they want to build digital outputs or not). Achieving a robust level of scholarly self-consciousness in the digital age is a challenge that most people have (I suggest) given up on, in the face of technological advance rather than methodological choice or epistemological orientation. This has huge implications for the integrity of future scholarship, but opens up equally fascinating areas for research and analysis.
I’ve been thinking about the now relatively long-standing debate in Digital Humanities about ‘who’s in and who’s out’ and wondering if there’s an angle we haven’t been considering (by writing ‘we’ this makes an assumption I’m ‘in’, of course, which I have to admit feels both presumptive given there’s a chance I don’t fit someone else’s criteria and odd given I’m a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities). My suggestion is that we need to stop only thinking about the specific technical skills a digital humanist needs, and consider the function the (extra)discipline plays in the broader community, as well as the role(s) it is likely to need to play in the future.
I’ve put off writing this post for a long time, and I’m still not sure about publishing it because I need to keep thinking it through and catching up on some reading on the topic. Perhaps I should also note that readers from New Zealand, Australia, and other ex-commonwealth nations (as well as Britain) might find it bemusing. The backstory is that I’m writing to a North American audience on a topic specific to the digital humanities. Here goes.