the scottbot irregular ← data are everywhen

Friends don’t let friends calculate p-values (without fully understanding them) 16

Apr

2013

I wrote this in 2012 in response to a twitter conversation with Mike Taylor, who was patient enough to read a draft of this post in late November and point out all the various ways it could be changed and improved. No doubt if I had taken the time to take his advice and change ...

Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2013 (part 1) 3

Apr

2013

The 2013 Digital Humanities conference in Nebraska just released its program with a list of papers and participants. As some readers may recall, when the initial round of reviews went out for the conference, I tried my hand at analyzing submissions to DH2013. Now that the schedule has been released, the data available puts us ...

On MOOCs 2

Apr

2013

Nobody has said so to my face, but sometimes I’m scared that some of my readers secretly think I’m single-handedly assisting in the downfall of academia as we know it. You see, I was the associate instructor of an information visualization MOOC this past semester, and next Spring I’ll be putting together my own MOOC ...

Liveblogged Review of Macroanalysis by Matthew L. Jockers, Part 2 4

Apr

2013

I just got Matthew L. Jocker’s Macroanalysis in the mail, and I’m excited enough about it to liveblog my review. Here’s the review of part II (Analysis), chapter 5 (metadata). Read Part 1, Part 3, … Part II: Analysis Part II of Macroanalysis moves from framing the discussion to presenting a series of case studies around a theme, starting ...

Liveblogged Review of Macroanalysis by Matthew L. Jockers, Part 1 1

Apr

2013

I just got Matthew L. Jocker’s Macroanalysis in the mail, and I’m excited enough about it to liveblog my review. Here’s my review of part I (Foundation), all chapters. Read Part 2, Part 3, … Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History is a book whose time has come. “Individual creativity,” Matthew L. Jockers writes, “is highly ...

Topic Modeling in the Humanities

Apr

2013

The cat is out of the bag: The Journal of Digital Humanities (2:1), special issue on topic modeling, has been released. It’s a fairly apt phrase, because the process of editing the issue felt a bit like stuffing a cat in a bag. When Elijah Meeks approached the JDH editors about he and I guest editing ...

Call for Computational Folkloristics Papers 2

Dec

2012

What’s this? Two CFPs at the Irregular in quick succession? That’s right, first Marten Düring’s fabulous Historical Network Research cfp comes out, and it has been followed closely by a call for papers by the great and powerful Tim Tangherlini. Those of you who don’t know him, should. Tangherlini organized the wildly successful Networks and ...

On the importance of a single historical author 6

Dec

2012

I have a dirty admission to make: I think yesterday happened. Actually. Objectively. Stuff happened. I hear that’s still a controversial statement in some corners of the humanities, but I can’t say for sure; I generally avoid those corners. And I think descriptions of the historical evidence can vary in degrees of accuracy, separating logically ...