It’s OK to Call It ‘Digital Humanities’

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I’ve been meaning to post something about William Pannapackers’s article “Stop Calling It ‘Digital Humanities’” for a couple of days, but my teaching schedule is stacked towards the beginning of the week, so it had to wait. Now that Rafael Alvarado’s response has appeared as an Editor’s Choice on Digital Humanities Now, I thought I’d set my fingers to typing.

Pannapacker laments the way that pedagogy has lagged behind research in the development of the Digital Humanities His main point seems to be that the identity of the Digital Humanities has developed so one-sidedly around research activity that it is difficulty to transfer to more teaching-oriented institutions, whether that means faculty lacking the resources to engage in Digital Humanities scholarship or faculty wishing to teach something called the Digital Humanities to their students.

Pannapacker is not advising us to give up.* Overall, his suggestions are helpful hints for how to overcome the barriers in certain kinds of institutions. But therein lies the problem. Pannapacker has primarily the small liberal arts college in mind, and he is unconsciously making the same mistake he critiques—proposing that the Digital Humanities be defined in terms of the mission of a particular type of institution.… Read more…

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What’s with the espresso?

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Many of my students ask me why I drink those little cups of espresso. I’m told that there are debates going on outside the classroom. So I thought I’d produce some kind of public explanation to put the speculation to rest. So here it is.

Espresso is a term used only in English-speaking countries. It is short for caffè espresso: coffee made expressly (i.e. upon request). It is made expressly for you when you order it. In Italy, the idea of pre-brewing coffee is unheard of. So ordering a caffè in Italy will always get you what Americans call “espresso”. In other Mediterranean countries you may get something a little different, depending upon the technology used to produce the coffee. But it is generally made to order.

Why the small cup? It’s sometimes called a demitasse. That’s French for “half-cup”, but it’s a particularly Italian style of drinking coffee based on an invention by Luigi Bezzerra by Desiderio Pavoni at the beginning of the twentieth century. Jimmy Stamp at Smithsonian.com describes them as the “the Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs of espresso”. The process used pressure to force hot water through fairly finely ground coffee beans in order to brew quickly and dispense directly into the cup.… Read more…

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Topic Modelling Early Middle English II

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This is a follow-up to my earlier post on Topic Models and Spelling Variation: The Case of Early Middle English. There I discussed the challenges of generating topic models of texts with non-standardised spelling where topics did not merely correspond to texts. In any given model, differences in the spelling systems of two texts will cause the generated topics to be prominent in some texts and effectively non-existent in others, whereas other topics will be non-existent in the former and prominent in the latter. Topics are thus essentially orthographic patterns, rather than rhetorical discourses or indicators of subject matter. My initial experiments showed that some linguistic smoothing–admittedly,  a questionable form of textual deformance–can help address this problem, along with increasing the granularity of the model by breaking texts into small chunks. Chunk sizes of about 1000 words began to reveal the sorts of patterns I was looking for: cases where individual topics had high prominence in parts of more than one text. But I speculated that chunk sizes needed to be still smaller in order make these patterns more noticeable. A second reason for using smaller chunk sizes is that it becomes much easier to make the leap back from distant to close reading.… Read more…

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Topic Models and Spelling Variation: The Case of Early Middle English

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Topic Modelling has developed quite a following in the DH world, but it still has a long way to go before it proves itself a reliable method for literary research. (Caveat: I have not yet read Matthew Jockers’ soon-to-be released Macroanalysis, which may answer many questions about how to use topic modelling to study literature.) As far as I can tell, topic modelling was originally tested on materials that, although diverse in subject matter, were fairly homogeneous in language. Literary language is problematic for topic modelling not so much because it contains more ambiguities or fuzziness than, say, scientific journals but because the types of questions literary scholars ask tend to probe at these aspects of language. There’s no reason why we should expect a single, and fairly new, computational method to provide miraculous insight into questions that sustain whole disciplinary fields, and neither is that a reason to assume that it can provide no insight at all. Topic modelling has already shown particular importance in the area of literary history, as can be seen from the work of Jockers’s work, as well as that of people like Ted Underwood and Lisa Rhody. But the results that they have made available share one thing in common with the various topic models of scientific journals, Day of DH posts, PMLA articles, and the like.… Read more…

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