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.
From the Wayback Machine: Do we need a Systems Analysis of the Digital Humanities?
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.