Digital Reading



Benjamin MacDonald Schmidt

Fellow, Cultural Observatory @ Harvard

Ph.D. Candidate in History, Princeton University

Overview



1. Digital Texts and the Digital Humanities

2. Reading with Millions of Texts

3. Focusing Attention: A case study

1. Digital Texts and the Digital Humanities


The 'first' Digital Humanists

In His mercy, around 1955, God led men to invent magnetic tapes.

Robert Busa in Perspective on the Digital Humanities: Schreibman et al, 2004.

Textual Research as Positivism

Mosteller and Wallace: Authorship attribution in the federalist papers

'Stylometrics' and 'Cliometrics'

Automated Classifications

Digital as play

"The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around" (Ramsay)

Play as Discovery

Digital reconfigurations for insight

Tools to democratize algorithmic exploration

Big Data

Funding

Media Attention

Culturomics and Google Ngrams

Distant Reading

  • Topic Modeling

  • Network Analysis

  • Geospatial visualization/Named Entity Recognition

    		•
    Relationships among novels

    Matthew Jockers and Elijah Meeks

    Texts without Authors

    Whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play.

    Stanley Fish

    Working with Metatadata

    Metadata shows hidden constraints

    History Projects draw on Metadata

    English Trial lengths

    (The Old Bailey Online)

    		Hume's correspondence

    (Mapping the Republic of Letters)

    2. Reading with Millions of Texts

    What to do with millions of texts?

  • Nothing

    • What to do with millions of texts?

  • Keyword Search

    • What to do with millions of texts?

    Science

    What to do with millions of texts?

    Hire Programmers

    What to do with millions of texts?

    Focused Reading

    Big Data as just another source

  • Digital sources contribute knowledge beyond individuals.

  • Metadata lets us look at social structures.

  • Once we know how to read it, we can accept its biases like any other source.

    (OCR is not so important!)

    • What to do with a new source

  • Source Criticism

    • What to do with a new source

  • Source Criticism

    • What to do with a new source

  • Source Criticism

    • What to do with a new source

  • Source Criticism

    • What to do with a new source

  • Source Criticism

  • Hermeneutics

  • Argument

    • Bookworm: Exploring Texts through Metadata

    (http://bookworm.culturomics.org)

    c. 1 million books

    80 billion words

    Library metadata via Open Library

    Digital Public Library of America

    Bookworm: Exploring Texts with Metadata

    Bookworm: Exploring Texts with Metadata

    Bookworm: Exploring Texts with Metadata

    3. Focusing Attention

    The History of Attention

    Attention as self-evident

    Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence.

    William James, Principles of Psychology

    Why attention?

    The History of Attention

    Adjectives, too

    Focus Attention
    Focus Attention

    Focusing Attention: a psychological metaphor

    Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence.

    William James, Principles of Psychology

    Mind as Camera

    Those who lay stress on the unity of mind regard it as almost evident a priori, that but one concept can occupy the focus of attention at a time... Attention, like the lens of the eye, is now [ie, first] accommodated to act as an instrument of near focus, high magnification, but limited aperture, and again [then] as one of distant focus, small magnifying-power, but wide range

    Can the Mind attend to two things at once? Science: July 18, 1887





    Epilogue: The Signification of the Frontier in American History

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