Update, July 11: my slides are here: slides.pdf. The R code used to generate material in the slides is available in a gist.
I’m attending the Digital Humanities 2014 conference in Lausanne next week. If you’re around Lausanne next Friday, my talk, titled Let DH Be Sociological!, is part of a panel at 11 a.m. in 415 Amphimax. This paper builds on my work using topic models to analyze the history of literary scholarship, but takes a more polemical tack. I’ll use my ten minutes to argue that the moment of “DH” represents a critical opportunity for bringing literary studies (and perhaps other humanities) closer to the social sciences.
Here’s the panel line-up, a very interesting and diverse group of papers on method:
Scholarly primitives revisited: towards a practical taxonomy of digital humanities research activities and objects
Borek, Luise; Dombrowski, Quinn; Munson, Matthew; Perkins, Jody; Schöch, Christof
Introducing digital humanities through the analysis of cultural productions
Reyes-Garcia, Everardo
Let DH Be Sociological!
Goldstone, Andrew
slides (pdf)
figure code (R)
Literary Canon and Digital Bibliographies: The Case of the United States
Ferrer, Carolina
Beyond the Tool: A Reflexive Analysis on Building Things in Digital Humanities
Couture, Stéphane; Sinclair, Stéfan
The links go through to the detailed abstracts of each paper, available in HTML and PDF. Indeed I am pretty sure I would not be able to read all of my abstract in the 10 minutes allotted.
There are some errors in the web display of my own abstract—my paper does not have the subtitle “[Short Paper]”! Considering that sophisticated text encoding is one of the central achievements of humanities computing you would think we would have solved the problem of exchanging marked-up scholarly text by now. The sciences do just fine with LaTeX. But I digress.