You have a collection of digital texts, now what? This workshop provides a gentle introduction to text analysis in the digital humanities using Voyant Tools, a collection of free web-based tools that can handle larger collections of texts, be they digitized novels, online news articles, twitter feeds, or other textual content. This workshop will be a hands-on, practical guide with lots of time to ask questions, so participants are encouraged to bring their own texts. In the workshop we will cover the following:

1. A brief introduction to text analysis in the humanities;
2. Preliminary exploration techniques using Voyant;
3. Basic issues in choosing, compiling, and preparing a text corpus;
4. Text mining to identify themes in large corpora;
5. Ludic tools and speculative representations of texts; and
6. Integrating tool results into digital scholarship.

This year’s workshop will pay special attention to certain multilingual issues in text analysis, such as character encoding, word segmentation, and available linguistic functionality for different languages. The instructors will present in English, but can also present or answer questions in French and Italian.

AUDIENCE: This is intended as an introduction to text analysis and visualization. We hope for an audience with a range of interests and relevant competencies. In the past we have had 20 to 25 participants, which works well with two workshop leaders. Participants are expected to bring their own laptop and are encouraged to bring their own texts.

LENGTH: half-day

WORKSHOP LEADERS: Stéfan Sinclair (McGill) and Geoffrey Rockwell (Alberta)

REQUIREMENTS: Participants are expected to have their own laptop.

The exact date and time of the workshop are yet to be determined.

Here are some of the more significant modifications that were made to RezoViz based on the Halfviz code:

• hovering over labels changes their colour
• labels that are linked also change colour, with little badges that indicate a value
• labels are drawn “above” the network lines to make them easier to read
• there’s an option to specify the maximum number of labels to show
• there is a search bar that produces results in the graph as you type
• edge (line) thickness and opacity are calculated dynamically based on relative values

Want to see it in action? Try the Humanist archives demo (that’s still a work in progress). I’ll post a link to the GitHub repository for the code soon. Keep posted as well for more news of full integration with Voyant Tools.

During the last MC² meeting we agreed that we would experiment with data aggregated by Montréal Ouvert, an initiative to promote open access to a range of municipal data from Montreal (similar open data initiatives exist in Canada and elsewhere). My usual research doesn’t much involved the use geographical data and I was keen to get my hands dirty and learn some new stuff; did I ever. I knew there was a variety of APIs and web services that would help us, though I hadn’t anticipated how quickly we would be able to create and play with a map, especially given data that wasn’t especially intended for mapping purposes. Much of the geo-coding magic was accomplished by BatchGeo, a service suggested by fellow MC² participant Renee Sieber.

The first step was to consult a list of data sources from the city of Montreal, compiled on the Actions page of Montréal Ouvert. The formats here vary, but it seemed preferable to start with something in XML – I was tempted by the bike-sharing Bixi data, but those were already geo-encoded (with latitude and longitude values), and I wanted more of a challenge. I opted for the “Health Inspection Infractions” from 2010, thinking it might be interesting to see what neighbourhoods had the most restaurants and other establishments that had been fined (for this quick and dirty experiment I didn’t correlate population, total number of restaurants, income levels or any other data that would probably be relevant if I were doing anything more than a quick experiment).

Once the source was chosen, I downloaded the XML file. I knew that BatchGeo required tabular data as presented in a spreadsheet, and since the XML file had a simple structure, I could do a quick search for a free, web-based XML to CSV converter like the one at Luxon Software. I uploaded the XML file to this service, and presto! downloaded at CSV file. I could now import this file into a spreadsheet program like Google Spreadsheets.

On the left is the source XML document (as viewed in a browser) and on the right is the converted spreadsheet data imported from comma separated values (as viewed in Google Spreadsheets).

Once in the spreadsheet, I could select on the content, copy it into the clipboard, and then paste it into the box in BatchGeo. Like magic, the table redraws itself with nicely formatted data. I still needed to set the relevant options, including to specify columns for the city, address, theme, and title. The final step was to hit the “Make Google Map” button and watch as the geo-coding was performed (BatchGeo was assigning longitude and latitude numbers based on the addresses provided). After about a minute, ding! there was a fully baked map:

The map generated by BatchGeo using the Health Infractions data in the spreadsheet. Click on the image to view the live map.

So, XML to CSV, CSV to BatchGeo to add geo-location data, and there we have a map. An amazing transformation from static XML data to an interactive map. Yes, it’s simplistic, but that’s the point: you can easily create and play with maps.

Given how unexpectedly quickly this went, I started looking for some alternatives. Again Renee introduced me to something new, the ability to import XML into a Google Spreadsheet, using a custom XPath query to define the values of each column. My first attempt at this actually failed, I suspect because the source XML document is wrongly declared by the server to be HTML, not XML. A quick posting of the XML file on my server allowed me to continue. Such are the joys of working with data in the wild – one must often use duct tape to make things work properly – in fact, I think that recognizing little problems along the way and figuring out how to resolve them is the essence of digital humanities – very little of interest works properly out of the box.

Anyway, now I could proceed with my importing of data into a new worksheet, using importXML.

The importXML function allows me to specify a URL source and an XPath query for each column.

I like my scripting languages as much as the next DHer, but Look Ma! No programming! Now that was a fun MC² meeting.

This morning’s order of business was to look at the department’s criteria for tenure and promotion. While I wasn’t able to substantially challenge the assumption that humanists should have a book, I do think there’s other language in the research criteria section that can provide enough leeway to allow for alternatives on an ad hoc basis. Two other things I care a lot about are 1) recognizing co-authorship (which I was overjoyed that one of my other colleagues brought up and we added language to the document to reflect that) and 2) and the inclusion of digital resources for tenure and promotion. I mentioned various guidelines and resources, including the MLA wiki on The Evaluation of Digital Work, and proposed the following addition to the document (hastily composed during the meeting):

Consideration may be given to digital resources (web sites, databases, programs, etc.) when the dossier provides evidence that such work represents original and substantial scholarship. Types of assessment may include formal peer review, citation metrics, and public impact.

I was very pleasantly surprised that my colleagues seemed unanimously and immediately supportive (there may have been objectors who remained quiet, but there was definitely a majority nodding in approval, not to mention the unanimous vote on this and other amendments proposed). In fact, one of my colleagues asked why we would put “consideration may” instead of “consideration should” – I replied that not all digital resources are created equal and that the onus can still be on the candidate to decide what to include and how to justify it as significant scholarship. Anyway, sometimes one anticipates the battles in the wrong places.

The document we were working on was specifically about criteria for tenure and promotion to Associate Professor, and the clause about digital scholarship doesn’t really apply to anyone currently in the department, but I’m really delighted that my department has taken a pro-active step in recognizing digital scholarship.

Photo by Mathieu Thouvenin

As much as I love the calmer pace and greater flexibility of summer, I was very happy to be back in the classroom today. My days are typically spent staring at the computer screen a lot and though I do interact with colleagues in person and through various media, there’s something very stimulating and satisfying that happens in the classroom that doesn’t happen elsewhere, at least for me. There were a lot of firsts in this inaugural seminar of LLCU-602: New Approaches to Scholarship in the Digital Humanities: first fully-fledged digital humanities course at McGill; first class for me to teach since my arrival at McGill; first course I’ve taught where a colleague is auditing it; etc… Below is the syllabus for the course, a humble contribution to the ever growing number of digital humanities syllabi out there. This syllabus may be of interest for the organization of the topics & assessments – unfortunately the readings aren’t included in this view, but I’ll post an updated version later in the term.

Summary

The Humanities are rich from centuries of intellectual practices and millennia of historical records and thought. The Digital Humanities seek to engage with those traditions while also exploring the potential for using digital technologies to extend modes of humanistic inquiry. What new interpretations might be spawned when bits of cultural data can be infinitely rearranged into representations unimaginable in analogue form? What new arguments might be proposed when we can instantly ask questions at the unprecedented scale of millions of books? Through a mix of seminar discussions, hands-on tutorials, and project-based work, this course will provide students with theoretical and practical foundations for working in the Digital Humanities, covering topics such as digitization, encoding, analysis, and visualization. No technical background is required.

Outcomes

• students will be able to describe the essential characteristics of the digital humanities as a discipline
• students will be familiar with a wide range of tools and techniques for digital humanities scholarship
• students will have expertise in using a set of tools effectively to enhance their own research
• students will have experience in communicating their ideas using a variety of digital platforms
• students will have experience in planning and implementing a collaborative digital project

Schedule

• Module 1: Overview & Tentative Definitions:
  • Week 1: What are the Humanities? What is Digital? What are the Digital Humanities?
  • Week 2: Humanities Scholarship in the Digital Age
• Module 2: Exploring & Critiquing Projects
  • Week 3: Scholarly Editing & Libraries
  • Week 4: Literary Criticism & Authorship Attribution
  • Week 5: Music, Film, Gaming
• Module 3: Getting our Feet Wet
  • Week 6: Digitization & Encoding
  • Week 7: Data Preparation, Representations & Databases
  • Week 8: Analytic Tools
  • Week 9: Visualization Tools
  • Week 10: Roll Your Own
• Module 4: Collaborative Projects
  • Week 11: Planning & Describing
  • Week 12: Implementing
  • Week 13: Preserving

Please note that further details, including readings, will be provided via the course management system. There are no bookstore purchases to be made for this course.

Evaluation

• Blog (30%): Students will write at least one blog entry per week that contains at least one paragraph of reflection on the week’s readings and at least one paragraph on an additional relevant reading that the student has found. Students are also encouraged to write on other topics, such as reflections on the past week’s seminar, thoughts on relevant news articles, ideas about possible projects, etc. Students should adopt the tone of academic blog (including references as needed) and the entries will be assessed based on the quality of the ideas and expression.
• Presentation (15%): Students will choose a topic of interest from the course schedule and create a presentation. Presentations must make significant use of a digital technology, but may not use slideware (PowerPoint, Keynote, Impress, etc.). Alternatives include Prezi, Xtranormal, and multimedia videos. Students will be assessed on the quality and usefulness of the information presented, as well as the effectiveness of the use of the chosen communication platform. References should be included.
• Individual Mini-Project Write-up (15%): In conjuction with Module 3 “Getting our Feet Wet” students will produce a mini-project that is the fruit of their individual efforts to digitize, prepare and analyze some textual corpus. The write-up should be under five pages and include a short summary of each component of the methodology and reflections on the overall process and success of the project. References may be included as appropriate. (Tentative deadline: November 14th.)
• Group Project (30%): This major group project is the culmination of the class. Students will work in groups of at least two to create a project with a significant digital component. Projects will include a write-up that documents objectives, description, collaboration, challenges, and possible future directions. References should be included as needed (scholarly references, related projects, code, etc.). (Tentative deadline: December 23rd.)
• Participation (10%): Student attendance and participation in seminar discussions is a crucial component of the class.

Policies

• This course is a mix of theory and practice – students are expected to attend and participate thoughtfully and respectfully in the seminar meetings. If possible, students should bring a laptop to class to participate in the hands-on components.
• The Course Management System will be used extensively in this class to post notes, important date changes, assignment descriptions, etc. You are responsible for checking the site regularly (at least twice a week) for any changes or updates.
• In accord with McGill University’s Charter of Students’ Rights, you may submit in English or in French any written work that is to be graded. Please be aware that impeccable grammar is required whether you choose to write in French or in English.
• McGill University values academic integrity. Therefore all students must understand the meaning and consequences of cheating, plagiarism and other academic offences under the Code of Student Conduct and Disciplinary Procedures (see www.mcgill.ca/students/srr/honest/ for more information). Please note that multimedia objects (images, video, etc.) as well as programming code are subject to the same standards of academic integrity.

Here’s the language that made it into my appointment contract:

The Faculty of Arts recognizes that Digital Humanities is a highly collaborative field where knowledge and innovation develop both through conventional modes of scholarship (peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, etc.) and through building of scholarly digital resources (including specialized software for the humanities).

Needless to say, this language wouldn’t work for every digital humanist, but I had two main objectives: 1) to emphasize that – unlike most research in the humanities – digital humanities work tends to be highly collaborative and the standard of single-author publications is not only irrelevant but in many cases counter-productive; 2) that part of digital humanities scholarship is building stuff, not to the exclusion of more widely recognized forms of scholarship, but potentially on equal footing (though the onus is still on us to argue and document how stuff we build is worth scholarship).

Although getting this language into my contract was a significant moral victory, it would be very naïve to suppose that the battle for valuing digital humanities scholarship stops there. To extrapolate from my own circumstances a bit, tenure, promotion and annual review committees are still likely to be composed of individuals who are more accustomed to traditional metrics of assessment, and – let us always remind ourselves – assessing digital humanities scholarship can be a challenge and is difficult to generalize into neat formulae. I think we want to make a case that co-authorship is different than how it’s commonly perceived in the sciences – in some cases a co-authored journal article may be worth a full article per author, in other cases it may be worth a straightforward proportion, and other times maybe yet another calculus is more appropriate. Assessing digital humanities projects is likely even more ad hoc. Again, the onus is on us to document and argue how are digital humanities work should be assessed. I actually think this additional responsibility will become one of the most significant defining characteristics of digital humanities scholarship. Very few people like documenting, but we need to get used to it and better at doing it.

I’d like to finish by saying that negotiating a contract is a weird and wonderful time – you’re elated that you’ve been offered a job and now you apparently enter into a perverse psychological battle of chicken to see how far you can get. Actually, I suspect most people under-negotiate (maybe in part because we’re (relieved) academics, dammit, not sales people). My advice, for what it’s worth, is to be respectful and realistic, but to try to create the best possible situation at the start. With the appropriate caveats and legal disclaimers, I would say that if you’ve been offered a job, they want you and you have more leverage than you may have for quite some time. I’ve never heard of anyone requesting something and then finding out that they’re no longer being offered the job – they may decline your request, but it’s worth asking. If you stay away from issuing ultimatums, you’ll know when you’ve pushed far enough.

Image by Mylittlefinger

My move this summer from McMaster to McGill is requiring me to confront a lot of changes, not least in transferring my hefty digital footprint between institutions. Much like moving house, a digital move is an opportunity to purge a lot of unused and neglected stuff – but still, it’s time-consuming and not much fun. My domain (stefansinclair.name) is hosted commercially and actually doesn’t need to be moved, but I’ve been meaning to update the site for quite a long time, and this seemed like a natural time to do it.

I’ve been using Drupal for several years now and on the whole it has worked fine. I initially chose it as a content management system in part because I wanted to have the flexibility to use weird and wonderful modules and rendering engines – things that require new data tables and very fine-grained control over how content was prepared and displayed. When I moved from the University of Alberta to McMaster I was experimenting more with a combined research and teaching website, and what I really wanted was something between a Learning Management System (like Moodle) and a blogging system (like WordPress) – Drupal seemed to be a good solution.

But ultimately my teaching sites remained separate (for various reasons, including security, registrar integration, server capacity load with 450 first-year students, etc.), and my main/research site remained fairly simple. As a result, I kept feeling that Drupal was overkill for my non-teaching site, and – worse yet – that I was making unnecessary compromises in terms of the user interface and installation maintenance. I’ve always thought that updating a Drupal site was way more difficult than it should be, what with having to make a parallel installation and then porting over any customizations that had been made (over time I’ve learned to make as few of these as possible). And don’t get me started about plugins (which over time I’ve learned to keep as minimal as possible). The site administration and page/blog editing interfaces are powerful and flexible, but I usually want a butter knife, not a Swiss Army knife. Also, I’ve tried several styled editors in Drupal (after learning to avoid plugins that I used to favour, like one for using Textile syntax), but I usually encounter problems of some kind while editing (especially when flipping back and forth from code and visual modes). Yes, Drupal 7 seems to be have improved things considerably, but try as I might I couldn’t get my data to import from Drupal 6, neither through the automatic update mechanism nor through manual intervention. I’d still recommend Drupal in some circumstances, but for my main website, I’d decided I’d had enough.

I’ve used WordPress in various contexts over the years, and for relatively straightforward content management scenarios – in other words the vast majority of cases – I think it’s just a slicker solution, right from the moment you install it (WordPress had a web-based installation script long before Drupal and it really does takes about 5 minutes to install, much to the delight of my graduate students this past fall who each created their own instance). And though it’s arguably less flexible, WordPress does have a dizzying number of very useful plugins (but I’m avoiding those, remember?). But more importantly, it makes simple things simple, with a lot of attention to useful details (like autosave). I realize that taking sides between Drupal and WordPress is akin to arguing that there’s a best programming language, it’s basically troll bait.

Here are a few notes on the new site (subject to change at any moment, of course):

• I’ve chosen the Magazine Basic theme that I first noticed here. I’m tempted to splurge for the premium Magazine Flow theme, but the basic one seems fine for now. Several colleagues I admire have opted recently for more minimalist skins (Bill, Steve, etc.), but I like this layout, even if it’s busier.
• I’m slowly moving content manually from my old (Drupal) site to this one – every import/conversion script I tried failed, in part because I think my Drupal installation was in such a confused state.
• The header logo contains a quick and dirty collage of some Voyeur Tools thumbnails, as taken from the TAPoR List of Tools.
• The Wordle-like visualization is the Voyeur Cirrus tool – there’s actually a WordPress plugin that we’re working on for it, but… ahem, I had problems with it and just opted for the generic syntax: <iframe src="http://voyeurtools.org/tool/Cirrus/?useReferer=1&stopList=stop.en.taporware.txt" width="100% height="450" /></iframe>
• Speaking of iframes, I installed this plugin to make it easier to embed them in normal posts with the styled editor (rather than fiddle with configuration options that aren’t in the web-based interface and that could cause problems during an update).
• Ok, I said I would try to avoid plugins, but I also installed the Twitter Tools plugin, in part to get my Twitter feed in the sidebar and in part to make it easier for me to send out a tweet when I post a message.
• I’ve licensed the content with a very liberal BY (attribution) Creative Commons license, as I’ve been convinced by Bethany’s thoughts on the matter.

So, what do you think of the new look?

Old

New

My reasoning was that students would probably only gain a slight incremental benefit from writing Yet Another Essay (even if we all benefit from every instance of writing and receiving feedback, no matter where we are in our careers). However, if I could formulate some assessment modules that encouraged students to express themselves with unconventional technologies – and, crucially, think about the process of formulating their ideas and arguments with the constraints and affordances of those technologies – then that experience would be much more valuable to them. Besides, I tend to like experimenting with pedagogy and don’t need much of an excuse do so.

Students had two mini-projects to complete where they were asked to use an unfamiliar technology to create a scholarly work related to Wikileaks. Each mini-project was meant to be relatively modest in scope; the primary objectives were to experiment and reflect on the process in an accompanying blog post. We considered a small range of options in class, and skimmed others, but students were encouraged to explore other options as well. Some of the students have a background in Multimedia, but most don’t.

The result was an eclectic mix of fascinating multimedia works. Here’s a sampling of some of what was done:

• a VuVox composition on Anonymous (write-up)
• President Palin talking to Vice-President Hillary Clinton about Wikileaks in an Xtranormal animation (write-up)
• a comic on Assange and freedom of speech built with Comic Life and displayed through Prezi (write-up)
• Vladman, a comic exploring the comparison between Putin and Batam (write-up)
• a pictographic album about Assange (write-up built in iMovie)
• a rap on Assange (write-up)

A second assessment module in the course was a formal interview. Students were asked to apply to a hypothetical position as director of digital communications at OpenLeaks. This exercise served two important purposes. First, it provided students with an opportunity to synthesize their knowledge from the class class content; the questions we asked were plausible interview questions, but many of them were specifically designed to have students demonstrate deeper knowledge of both Wikileaks and of relevant technologies. Second, the formal interview gave students a chance to think about and describe how their entire educational experience – up to and including this course – might have prepared them for a job like this. The interview was a class activity, but it was also a step toward professionalization as students ponder their next steps (this was the last class in what most of these students consider their last degree). Essentially, the interview was an oral exam, but one that could reasonably be considered practice for what awaits them after graduation.

Finally, students maintained a blog during the term that was also assessed. No, I don’t consider a blog a simple replacement for an essay, the form and structure is completely different (if truly done as a blog). Among many other differences, maintaining a weekly blog spreads an even amount of work over the term, rather than having students desperately trying to write a major essay toward the end of term (when they have other things due at the same time). In any case, blogging has become much more common now in pedagogy, but I think there are some characteristics that are worth noting in how blogs were use in this course:

• the blog was not a supplement to the course, it was a core component; almost everything was organized around the blog
• many of the weekly blog posts were designed to gather data and information that served for in-class activities like the collaborative building of a timeline
• students were asked to combine these data gathering expeditions with reflections on the process and the technologies

More than anything else, the blogs allowed me to not teach. Not teaching is difficult because it takes a lot of discipline. Also, as others like Cathy Davidson have described, not teaching is a lot of work because it requires careful planning and a judicious dose of structure. I deliberately chose to organize this course around Wikileaks because I’m not an expert in that topic, and I wanted to go through the process of researching and studying the phenomenon with students, not for students. The blogs were the students’ repository, resource and journal; they became the authority (rather than me).

I haven’t decided yet if not assigning an essay would work for any class I teach, but I’m very happy with the results in this one.

We now have three years of DayOfDH blogging archives – that’s a pretty rich record of how digital humanists describe their activities in a given day. It also constitutes an interesting corpus for practising what Geoffrey Rockwell and I have been calling rapid analysis – trying to see what one might usefully glean from a relatively quick look at digital texts using specialized tools. Our interest in this is to develop techniques that might be useful to a wide range of people in digital society – for instance, students doing preliminary research or journalists compiling materials for an article.

Building the corpus was relatively, made even easier by a few tweaks kindly done by the DayOfDH team. I downloaded a full RSS archive of each years like this (I did this on the command-line, but you can just open each quoted URL in the browser and save it if it seems more convenient):

    $ curl "http://ra.tapor.ualberta.ca/~dayofdh/?wpmu-feed=posts" > 2009.xml
    $ curl "http://ra.tapor.ualberta.ca/~dayofdh2010/?wpmu-feed=posts" > 2010.xml
    $ curl "http://ra.tapor.ualberta.ca/~dayofdh2011/?wpmu-feed=fullfeed" > 2011.xml

I tried uploading the documents into Voyeur Tools, but I encountered problems with the XML from the 2011 archive – it contains illegal code characters that invalidate the XML (which is produced programmatically by the PHP in WordPress, so these kinds of problems are fairly common). One of the easiest ways to resolve control character issues is using the free TextWrangler editor for Mac – there’s a function charmingly called “Zap Gremlins” that does just that. Once the problems were fixed, I could then proceed to upload files to Voyeur Tools. (This can be done by going to the main page, selecting the options icon (the gear above and to the right of the large text box), choosing RSS2 as the Input Format, clicking OK, clicking the upload button, adding each of the downloaded files, and then clicking “Upload”.) Voyeur Tools has a special input format called RSS2 that essentially concatenates all of the text in the description tag – you can also ask it to create separate documents for each blog entry, but here I wanted all blog entries in each file to be combined into one document.

My first thought was to compare all three documents using a Wordle-like visualization called Cirrus. Like Wordle, the current algorithm of Cirrus lays items out with some random variation, which means that each time the Cirrus is loaded it can look different, even with the same text. However, unlike Wordle, Cirrus provides more information when hovering over words and also allows users to click on words to further study them with other tools. I will embed static images here, but clicking on the images will open up the actual Cirrus visualization:

Having compared this kind of visualization between documents several times before, one of the first things that struck me is how similar the results are between documents – not all that surprising given the coherence of the three documents. Still, there are some interesting phenomena one might be interested in exploring further:

• it’s partly the layout, but 2011 does seem to have the clearest prominence of the words day, digital and humanities
• 2011 also seems to have more occurrences of “dh”, perhaps signalling an increased comfort and recognition with that abbreviation (influence of Twitter?)
• 2009 has an interesting anomaly with the word “replace”, probably in large part because Martin Holmes was doing some XSL
• the prevalence of the word “new” seems to increase over time

The Cirrus is useful for helping to perceive some things very quickly, but is too blunt an instrument in other ways. For instance, one thing that’s not clear is that the word “library” is much more common in 2010 than in the other years (but since it’s relatively small even in 2010, it doesn’t draw attention to itself). Similarly, the word “world” spikes in 2011 – possibly because of world events – but still remains understated in the visualization. A better way of capturing some of those variations among less frequent words is to display sparklines of the relative frequencies of some terms. Consider, for instance, the following terms (the mini-graphs show relative frequencies for the three documents in the corpus in chronological order):

teaching

students

working

conference

A quick read of this might suggest that discussion in blog posts of teaching and of students has decreased since 2009, but that more people are talking about working in general and about conferences (DayOfDH coincided with several conferences such as the Society for Textual Scholarship).

As some of you may know from recent blog posts, my new pet tool is the Correspondence Analysis Scatterplot visualization (thanks to Geoffrey for nagging me for several months to build it), which helps with this kind of inquiry because it can help to show affinities between terms and documents by forcing both to be plotted in a Cartesian space. In other words, though a term like “digital” appears in all documents, it needs to be plotted in a specific location, in this case closest to 2011. I consider this kind of determinism with the utmost suspicion, but at the same time it can be useful to see what the computer tells us are the terms that statistically cluster around certain documents (given the list of high frequency terms that are specified).

There’s clearly a lot to explore here. As always, I feel compelled to emphasize that I don’t think these tools produce significant results on their own, they’re really a means of exploring the text and interpreting data to search for insights that need to be further explored and studied. What do you notice about three years of DayOfDH using the ScatterPlot skin or the new Simple skin?

1. Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET): Visualizing the Convergences and Divergences of Text and Performance with Jennifer Roberts-Smith (Waterloo; PI), Teresa Dobson (UBC), Stan Ruecker (Alberta) and Sandra Gabriele (York). Building on an initial prototype called Watching the Script and a more recent prototype developed in the context of a SSHRC ITST grant, SET is a project to develop, theorize, and assess the usability of a fully functional digital tool for exploring text and performance in both digital and physical theatre environments. SET enables experimentation in moving from text to performance and back, acknowledging the transitions between two- and three-dimensionality (on screen and stage) and negotiating the relationships between static and temporal media in the process. To our knowledge, SET is the only existing tool that permits users to input and edit scripts, upload 3-D models of theatres and stage sets, move character avatars in 3-D space, annotate all elements, and, crucially, to link text and annotations to stage action in real time.
2. Analyse du récit à l’ère d’Internet. Textes, outils et chercheurs en réseau avec Madeleine Jeay (McMaster; PI), Francis Gingras (U de Montréal), Hélène Cazes (Victoria), Daniel Maher (Calgary) et Ugo Dionne (U de Montréal). Ce projet se situe dans le contexte d’une approche des textes littéraires qui insiste sur l’importance de recadrer l’œuvre dans un ensemble globalisant de relations, tant en diachronie qu’en synchronie, notamment par le dialogue qu’entretient le discours littéraire avec ceux de l’art et de la culture. Cela conduit à travailler sur des corpus textuels et donc à s’intéresser aux récurrences, à la topicité, aux processus de transformation. Il se situe par ailleurs dans le prolongement d’une réflexion sur la possibilité d’exploiter les textes électroniques et les bases de données pour répondre à des questions d’ordre littéraire. Jusqu’à présent, la nature algorithmique des outils informatiques a surtout conduit à des résultats présentés sous forme d’index, concordances, tableaux de fréquence, etc. Alors qu’on peut observer des réussites certaines en linguistique et en stylistique, le critique littéraire se trouve face à une masse d’informations pour lesquelles il ne possède pas encore les stratégies de traitement adéquates. L’objectif principal du projet est d’offrir aux spécialistes de l’analyse du récit un ensemble d’outils conceptuels et technologiques pour l’exploitation des bases de données et des sources en ligne qui sont à leur disposition. L’approche est fondée sur l’observation des phénomènes de récurrence de motifs et de configurations narratives propres à la narrativité d’Ancien Régime. Il est dans la continuité d’un projet qui a conduit à la réalisation du système d’interrogation PBLit qui permet d’interroger trois bases de données sélectionnées pour des raisons historiques et circonstancielles autant que théoriques : Hyperlistes, Satorbase et le Thesaurus des motifs merveilleux dans le récit médiéval. Dans l’optique d’une histoire du fait littéraire, le projet, par une meilleure appréhension des formes de réemplois et de récurrences topiques, devrait permettre de mieux évaluer ce qu’on peut considérer comme la mutation épistémologique du XIXe siècle qui fonde la créativité sur des critères d’originalité et d’expression personnelle.