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The Myth of Text Analytics and Unobtrusive Measurement

Just realized Klout is the perfect metaphor for media in the modern era. It assumes you’re an expert in anything you talk a lot about. — Dan Munz (@dan_munz) May 5, 2012 Text analytics are often used in the social sciences as a way of unobtrusively observing people and their interactions. Humanists tend to approach […]

More heavy-handed culturomics

A few days ago, Gao, Hu, Mao, and Perc posted a preprint of their forthcoming article comparing social and natural phenomena. The authors, apparently all engineers and physicists, use the google ngrams data to come to the conclusion that “social and natural phenomena are governed by fundamentally different processes.” The take-home message is that words describing […]

The Networked Structure of Scientific Growth

Well, it looks like Digital Humanities Now scooped me on posting my own article. As some of you may have read, I recently did not submit a paper on the Republic of Letters, opting instead to hold off until I could submit it to a journal which allowed authorial preprint distribution. Preprints are a vital […]

Early Modern Letters Online

Early modern history! Science! Letters! Data! Four of my favoritest things have been combined in this brand new beta release of Early Modern Letters Online from Oxford University. Summary EMLO (what an adorable acronym, I kind of what to tickle it) is Oxford’s answer to a metadata database (metadatabase?) of, you guessed it, early modern […]

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More heavy-handed culturomics

The Networked Structure of Scientific Growth