Here’s a stoplist you can use http://bridge.library.wisc.edu/jockersStopList.txt
This link redirects and I couldn't find the original text file by googling, but the full stoplist is available on his website here http://www.matthewjockers.net/macroanalysisbook/expanded-stopwords-list/ I just copied and pasted into my text editor and saved as a .txt file
Basic Text Mining in R
I think this link is broken
The age of abundance, it turns out, can simply overwhelm researchers, as the sheer volume of available digitized historical newspapers is beginning to do
I find this paradox interesting - that an abundance of data could actually ultimately result in less accurate or meaningful information.
The broader purpose behind this effort has been to help scholars develop new toolsfor coping effectively with the growing challenge of doing research in the age of abundance, as the rapid pace of mass digitization of historical sources continues to pick up speed. Historical records of all kinds are becoming increasingly available in electronic forms, and there may be no set of records becoming available in larger quantities than digitized historical newspapers.
This section is a nice summary of a lot of the issues that we've discussed over the past couple weeks, particularly in module 2 and 3
dirty OCR illuminates the priorities, infrastructure, and economics of the academy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
This reminds me of the Coding History podcast from last week and Ian Milligan's remarks on Geocities. Today's google search result is tomorrow's history!
The consequences of “errorful” OCR files, to borrow a term from computer science, influence our research in ways by now well expounded by humanities scholars, inhibiting, for instance, comprehensive search
Thinking about the consequences of technology that produces "errorful" work is definitely interesting, but I think it's important to keep in mind that tech which produces seemingly errorless work should be scrutinized just as much. Maybe I'm being too cynical, but if I got a perfect piece of OCR I think I'd wonder what was left out in the process of making it so clear.
Where did it come from, and how did it come to be?
It's interesting to think of the digital object itself as an artifact, rather than just a copy
To that end, I published an online component that charted the article’s digital approach and presented a series of interactive maps.
There seems to be a line in the sand drawn here between traditional academic audiences and more digitally-savvy audiences. I wonder if the trouble with reconciling these two groups has anything to do with the challenges of introducing complex methodological techniques to scholars who might be intimidated or feel entrenched in their own methods
It’s that there is a fundamental imbalance between the proliferation of digital history workshops, courses, grants, institutes, centers, and labs over the past decade, and the impact this has had in terms of generating scholarly claims and interpretations.
I wonder if this bias has anything to do with the fact that digital labour often seems invisible from the outside. I imagine most historians can appreciate the work that goes into physical searches for data and transcribing sources, but in a culture that's conditioned to think of 'digital' as synonymous with 'instantaneous' (thinking of google search results for instance, or just search functions in general) maybe it's harder to recognize the amount of work that goes into developing and executing these methods, and therefore producing academic work that follows these techniques appears less prestigious
The scholarship tent has gotten bigger, and that’s a good thing.
This is one of the things I find most exciting about digital humanities work. The 'scholarship tent' is now starting to include many different disciplines, and thinking about how the tools that digital humanities scholars use could be applied to other fields is really exciting.
Seven years later the digital turn has, in fact, revolutionized how we study history. Public history has unequivocally led the charge, using innovative approaches to archiving, exhibiting, and presenting the past in order to engage a wider public. Other historians have built powerful digital tools, explored alternative publication models, and generated online resources to use in the classroom.
It's pretty neat to consider how quickly these new research methods have come into use
A seam-free service is one that maximises ease-of-use.
Hmm, but at what cost? Google has ease-of-use down pat, but I have to wonder what kind of concessions you make as a user (without necessarily realizing) in terms of the kind of information you're receiving.
“For Elsevier it is very hard to purchase specific journals—either you buy everything or you buy nothing,” says Vincent Lariviere, a professor at Université de Montréal. Lariviere finds that his university uses 20 percent of the journals they subscribe to and 80 percent are never downloaded.
This seems like a double-edged sword to me - on the one hand, obviously there's a financial incentive to create more and more journals that universities and libraries will then be obliged to buy according to this system, but on the other hand, the creation of more journals means more opportunity for academics to get published...which I guess leads to a whole other conversation about the premium placed on academic publishing as a form of accreditation.
As Director 0f University of Michigan Press I’m afraid to say that everything you say in this post, Sheila, is true. We’ve struggled over the last few years to bring innovative digital projects into the mainstream press workflow, and you’ve been caught in the middle.
I have to say, seeing this comment is one of the most interesting parts of this article for me! There really seems to be a contrast here between what Michelle Moravac suggests regarding writing in public as a means of countering isolation in academic writing and Sheila Brennan's experience of increased isolation from the academic community as a result of creating work publicly.
Then change directory into it
This is a bit awkwardly worded. It took me a second to understand what the instruction was.
Rather than dozens of us all flying to Library and Archives Canada, taking our own photographic record of RCMP/CSIS records, say, wouldn’t it better if we cooperated more?
Interestingly, I think there's already an amateur community of family historians who do a great job with this kind of cooperation. I know from my dad's 10+ year quest to dig up our family's history that collaboration between individuals in the online genealogy community is really common. These communities share all kinds of data, and not all of it comes from centralized sources like national archives, but also the local level. From what I've observed, there's a kind of reciprocity that exists in these communities. Interesting to consider whether how to pressure to publish original research in academic may contribute to a kind of hoarding of information on the part of professional researchers.
it’s our data, we collected it, and if somebody else wants the data, they should collect it themselves.
I definitely understand why a researcher would feel this way, but to be fair, if your means of collecting data is scanning old documents it strikes me that the data you collect is already less "yours" than if it came from an experiment or from your own field research. And really, to expand on that further, does any data concerning human participants/subjects ever really belong wholly to the researcher? Surely such data belongs more so to the people being studied (even if they're long dead) than the researcher.
It does so through a process of compression, by selectively reducing complexity until once-obscure patterns and relationships become clear.
As an Anthropology student, this characterization of the macroscope made me think of the kind of work that socio-cultural anthropology attempts to do - take the chaos of the social world and unveil meaning from what, to the naked or untrained, eye might otherwise seem to lack any larger significance.
THIS TEXT
This is a really cool tool. :)