Data analysis in the humanities presents challenges of scale, interpretation, and communication distinct from the social sciences or sciences.
This seminar will explore the emerging practices of data analysis in the digital humanities from two sides: a critical perspective aiming to be more responsible readers of cultural analytics, and a creative perspective to equip you to perform new forms of data analysis yourself.
Our goal is to make it possible to merging forms of data analysis taking place in humanities scholarship, both in terms of applying algorithms and in terms of better investigating the presuppositions and biases of the digital object. We’ll aim to come out much more sophisticated in the use of computational techniques and much more informed about how others might use them.
Some of the key questions we’ll aim to answer are:
A wide variety of types of data will be used but we will focus particularly on methods for analyzing texts. If your interests lie elsewhere, don’t worry too much–as you’ll learn, most of the textual approaches we’ll consider are easily adaptable for (and in many cases, orginally developed for) other sources of data.
Over the course of the semester, you should work to develop your own collection; ideally it will be of texts. Working with these texts will allow us to ask more sophisticated questions on large documents of scholarly importance.
Be able to contribute to debates about the place of data analysis in the humanities from both a technical and theoretical perspective, in a way that lets you responsibly elicit “data” (or as Johanna Drucker would have it, “capta”) out of more humanistic stores of knowledge.
Acquire proficiency in the manipulation, transformation, and graphic presentation of data in the R programming language for use in the context of exploratory data analysis and presentation.
Know the appropriate conditions for using, and be able to use, some of the major machine learning algorithm for data classification, clustering, and dimensionality reduction.
Execute projects creatively deploying and combining these methods in ways that contribute to humanistic understanding.
This is an unconventional methods course, because we’ll be looking at two very different kinds of methods; literature and code
You must attend class each week having completed the assigned readings and ready to discuss them. Note that the schedule also includes a number of optional explorations of the algorithms; these are for your edification only.
To help consolidate your programming abilities, there will be weekly problem sets. The first can be completed in any form you like; later ones should be mailed to me as R Markdown Documents. (This is the format I’ll be sending them to you as.)
They should be completed weekly, and e-mailed to me before the start of class. Problem sets are required but ungraded–I understand that you may not be able to complete them every week.
They also
Once we get our feet wet, I’ll ask you to post results of data explorations online. If I were you, I’d do this on a blog or straight to social media. Also keep them coming to class. This can be on one of the large unstructured sets I provide, or another data source you work out with me in class.
After break, we’ll be exploring a series of specific algorithms. Some we’ll go over in depth in class; others we’ll only touch on obliquely. Based on the data from class you find most interesting (or data of your own, we’ll work to determine which of those algorithms may make sense as a transformation. You’ll then write up a short version of the exploration for the course blog, present it briefly in class, and then revise your post in response to comments.
If you are taking this under the guise of a research seminar with your own materials, you should produce a multifaceted analysis with a reflective, methodological take on the data you bring to the class. This could either take the form of an explicit journal article for a digital humanities audience (I would mirror those in what used to be called Literary and Linguistic Computing) or a 10-20 methodological appendix to a larger work (such as a dissertation) giving the details of an analysis that may take only a few pages in a more traditional work. You’ll consult with me over the semester about how best to integrate your sources with materials from class
If you are taking it as a readings course, you still should create something. As we move into the later weeks of the semester, you should figure out which of the the various data sets we’ve used may be particularly interesting and find a way to build out on the techniques and strategies to create something novel. Most likely, this will be an experiment along the lines of the “Quantitative Formalism” pamphlet we read later. In it, you will take the fundamental advantages of a programming environemnt combine some of the various methods and strategies we’ve learned in a programming environment, or build out some new ones. Appropriate products might include a large-format print map, a set of blog posts exploring generic distances, or
This is an advanced graduate seminar; I hope that the syllabus will change in response to your own interests and readings. The last week, in particular, will be decided by vote.
This flexibility may cause problems of “versioning”: what version of the syllabus should you believe? So for the record, the priority for what to do consists of:
Grading in this course is thorny. As graduate students, you should be starting to get a sense of what is important to you; I’m not going to quiz you on the parts of books that you find interesting.
At the same time, a small seminar requires focused engagement from all students (and from the faculty member, it should go without saying). So we can’t just go all loosy-goosey here.
Instead, we’ll use a form of ‘contract grading.’ That means: you tell me affirmatively what you want to accomplish in this class and for what grade, and I’ll contract with you to allow that.
Example Template
I will:
- Attend every class
- Read all of the assigned texts to the point and come with established opinions about them.
- Work to complete all of each distributed workset before class.
- Support my peers in the class in the way that best supports their learning (which sometimes entails giving ‘the answer,’ and sometimes does not, but always entails treating them respectully).
- Work to develop my own data source, and find 4 jumping off points where I apply methods from class to it.
- Read and review one book or article not on the syllabus and present in one week.
- Produce a web-based final project looking at data intended for my dissertation, improving the jumping-off points.
You shouldn’t use precisely this template! It might be too much for you. Or you might want to move in slightly a different direction. You might not have a dissertation data, say. But conversely, you can’t remove the bit about treating your peers respectfully.
You can also demand additional things out of me. Generally I’ll give a once-over to the problem sets–but let me know if you want detailed comments on your code.
E-mail a proposed contract to me by Wednesday in the second week of classes.
This course will have you writing some code in the R language. There is an extensive debate about whether digital humanists need to learn to code which we’re not going to engage in; the fact of the matter is simply that if you want to either do data analysis in the humanities, coding will often be the only way to realize your personal vision; and if you want to build resources in the humanities that others might want analyze, you’ll need to know what sophisticated users want to do with your tools to make them work for them.
I have no expectation that anyone will come out of this a full-fledged developer. In fact, I hope that by doing some actual scripting, you’ll come to see that these debates over learning to code brush over a lot of intermediate stages. We’ll be focusing in particular in developing skills less in full-fledged “programming,” but in “scripting.” That means instructing a computer in every stage of your work flow; using a language rather than a Graphical User Interface (GUI), which may be almost all the program you’ve used before. This takes more time at first, but has extraordinary advantages over working in a GUI:
In this class, you will have to do some coding as well as just thinking about data analysis in the humanities. If you’ve never coded before, this will be frustrating from time to time. (In fact, if you’ve done a lot of coding before, it will still be frustrating!)
We’ll be working entirely in the “R” language, developed specifically for statistical computing. This has three main advantages for the sort of work that historians do:
It is easy to download and install, though the program RStudio. This makes it easy to do “scripting,” rather than true programming, where you can test your results step by step. It also means that R takes the least time to get from raw data to pretty plots of anything this side of Excel. RStudio also offers a number of features that make it easier to explore data interactively.
It has a set of packages we’ll be using for data analysis called dplyr, tidyr, and ggplot2. These are not core R libraries, but they are widely used and offer the most intellectually coherent approach to data analysis and presentation of any computing framework in existence. That means that even if you don’t use these particular tools in the future, working with them should help you develop a more coherent way of thinking about what data is from the computational side, and what you as a humanist might be able to do with it. These tools are rooted in a long line of software based on making it easy for individuals to manipulate data: read the optional source on the history of database populism to see more. The ways of thinking you get from this will serve you will in thinking about relational databases, structured data for archives, and a welter of other sources.
It is free: both “free as in beer,” and “free as in speech,” in the mantra of the Free Software Foundation. That means that it–like the rest of the peripheral tools we’ll talk about–won’t suddenly become inaccessible if you lose a university affiliation.
For those reasons, I’ll expect you to most run-of-the-mill assignments using R. But: If for some reason you have a strong desire to use a different language for parts of your analysis, talk to me about when it might be appropriate. Many scientists now use Julia for high-powered machine learning. A certain distinction will attach to the first person in the humanities to use it for their work; maybe it will be you! You may have learned Stata if you took undergrad Econ classes; and I myself find Python indispensable for working with texts, although I prefer R for the data analysis tasks we’re doing here. If you think one of these or another language you know will be appropriate for parts of the class, let me know.
One thing you can’t do in this course, though, is rely on the out-the-box approaches prevalent in many DH programs. ArcGIS or QGIS may be the best way to make maps, and Gephi the best way to do network analysis. But as this is a course in data analysis, I want you to think about the fundamental operations of cartography and network analysis as simply subsets of a broader field, which is hard to see from the confines . All of these things are possible in R. And unlike graphical tools, working in a language saves your workflow. If you make a map with laboriously poisitioned points in ArcGIS, your operations aren’t open for inspection. In R, though, every step you take and every move you make can be preserved. This is called reproducible research, and it is among the most important contributions you can make when working collaboratively.
I’m updating this from the 2015 syllabus–but things have changed in this field, a lot, and so will the syllabus before we start. I’ve also stolen a lot from Ryan Cordell’s 2017 offering of this course
Notes: mostly we’ll be reading articles in this course available online. A few books are required for purchase. If you have difficulty obtaining any texts, please let me know as soon as possible.
In week 1, you’ll read my spiel about what humanists need to understand when they read CS. My answer is, in general–you need to know what they did, but not how they did it. I’ve put some CS papers in this syllabus to expand your thinking about what’s possible. You should absolutely, positively, not aim to understand the process. As a rule, if you see a fancy equation in an article not written by a humanist, you can probably skip the whole section for the time being.
Thursday, January 10
Problem set: Regex practice. Note: Regular expressions embody pretty much everything that is miserable, ugly, and inelegant about computer programming. But they’re basically indispensable for actually manipulating data in the real world. So we baptize by fire!
Thursday, January 17
read_table and tidyrtidyr to manipulate a data set into a form for network representations.%>% apply %>% combineThursday, January 24
A huge amount of work is just: finding interesting things to count. Often, sophisticated work can just be figuring how to count something new. Here we look a little bit at how you can, simply count something.
Problem Set: Split/Apply/Combine
Do a bit of a research to try to find some tabular data that you can bring to class about something you’re interested in.
Good data for these purposes.
Exception/special case: is there textual data you can work with?
%>% visualizationThursday, January 31
Problem set: Visualization
ggplot2Some documentation is available at Wickham “Ggplot2.”
Penumbral:
Reading postponed–keep working on the visualization task with the HathiTrust books.
%>% dataThursday, February 14.
%>% the Embedding Strategy.Thursday, February 21
Modern machine learning requires data, but it doesn’t just look like an XML or TEI representation. Instead, a particular trick for turning items into strings of numbers–the embedding strategy–has emerged as the dominant ways for computers to represent information to themselves. So we’ll talk about that strategy, and how to get things in and out of it.
Supplemental readings (technical explanations):
Thursday, February 28
Thursday, March 14
Problem sets:
Methods:
Thursday, March 21
Problem sets and methods:
Thursday, March 28
Thursday, April 4
I am indebted to a variety of people for contributions to this class. Those whose syllabi I have taken readings, ideas, and (in one case) a unit title from include Andrew Goldstone, Johanna Drucker, Lev Manovich, Jason Heppler, and Ted Underwood.
In revising it, I’ve leaned on Ryan Cordell’s 2017 offering of the course.
I also gratefully acknowledge Andrew Goldstone’s contribution to the syllabus template.
#Full Citations
Allison, Sarah, Ryan Heuser, Matthew L. Jockers, Franco Moretti, and Michael Witmore. Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment (Stanford Literary Lab, Pamphlet 1). Stanford: Standford Literary Lab, n.d.
Behrens, John T. “Principles and Procedures of Exploratory Data Analysis.” Psychological Methods 2, no. 2 (1997): 131. http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/met/2/2/131/.
Blevins, C. “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston.” Journal of American History 101, no. 1 (2014): 122–147. doi:10.1093/jahist/jau184.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books ; Distributed by the MIT Press, 2007.
Gitelman, Lisa. "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron. Infrastructures Series. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013.
Goldstone, Andrew, and Ted Underwood. “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us.” New Literary History 45, no. 3 (2014): 359–384. doi:10.1353/nlh.2014.0025.
James, Gareth. An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7138-7.
Jockers, Matt. Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature. Springer, 2014. http://www.springer.com/statistics/computational+statistics/book/978-3-319-03163-7.
Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature 85, no. 4: 661–688. Accessed January 14, 2015. doi:10.1215/00029831-2367310.
Mosteller, Frederick, and David L. Wallace. “Inference in an Authorship Problem: A Comparative Study of Discrimination Methods Applied to the Authorship of the Disputed Federalist Papers.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 58, no. 302 (1963): 275–309. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.1963.10500849.
Ramsay, Stephen. Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Topics in the Digital Humanities. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
Rhody, Lisa M. “Topic Modeling and Figurative Language.” Journal of Digital Humanities 2, no. 1 (April 7, 2013). http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-1/topic-modeling-and-figurative-language-by-lisa-m-rhody/.
Schmidt, Benjamin. “Stable Random Projection: Lightweight, General-Purpose Dimensionality Reduction for Digitized Libraries.” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2018). doi:10.22148/16.025.
Tukey, John W. Exploratory Data Analysis. Addison-Wesley Series in Behavioral Science. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co, 1977.
Underwood, Ted, David Bamman, and Sabrina Lee. “The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction.” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2018). doi:10.22148/16.019.
Wickham, Hadley. “Ggplot2.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics 3, no. 2 (2011): 180–185. doi:10.1002/wics.147.
Wilkens, Matthew. “The Geographic Imagination of Civil War-Era American Fiction.” American Literary History 25, no. 4: 803–840. Accessed January 15, 2015. doi:10.1093/alh/ajt045.
Witmore, Michael. “Text: A Massively Addressable Object,” December 31, 2010. http://winedarksea.org/?p=926.
The algorithms we will discuss in the second half of the semester are discussed in greater length in this text. If you wish to come to more mathematical understanding, this provides a relatively gentle introduction in machine-learning terms, but with some levels of math we’ll gloss over in this class, also based in the R language. All chapters are available for download, for free, from the Northeastern library; download any now that you find helpful.↩
For those interested solely in text analysis and not census, bibliographic, or other forms of “humanities data,” this may be valuable. But be aware it uses a different set of libraries and data models for visualization and analysis than the ones we are using in this class, so the code is unlikely to work immediately↩