Guest

Avery Blankenship, Northeastern University English

Discussion Topic

Many genealogies of DH put text not just at the center of the field, but a its origins, as scholars created digital editions of literary and historical works and experimented with computational analysis of those materials. From literary corpora to political documents to social media, text continues to be a central data form to the digital humanities, even as methods expand to include more visual, aural, and other data forms.

Discussion Prep and Collaborative Notes Document

Core

  • Choose any 2 pieces (they’re all short) from the Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 forum, “Text Analysis at Scale”:
    1. Stephen Ramsay, “Humane Computation,” external link
    2. Ted Underwood, “Distant Reading and Recent Intellectual History,” external link
    3. Tanya E. Clement, “The Ground Truth of DH Text Mining,” external link
    4. Lisa Marie Rhody, “Why I Dig: Feminist Approaches to Text Analysis,” external link
    5. Tressie McMillan Cottom, “More Scale, More Questions: Observations from Sociology,” external link
    6. Benjamin M. Schmidt, “Do Humanists Need to Understand Algorithms?” external link
    7. Joanna Swafford, “Messy Data and Faulty Tools,” external link
    8. Alan Liu, “N + 1: A Plea for Cross-Domain Data in the Digital Humanities” external link
  • Jo Guldi, “Critical Search: A Procedure for Guided Reading in Large-Scale Textual Corpora,” Cultural Analytics (2018), external link
  • Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak, “The Goodreads ‘Classics’: A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism” (2021), external link
  • Avery Blankenship, “What We Didn’t Know a Recipe Could Be: Political Commentary, Machine Learning Models, and the Fluidity of Form in Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Recipes” (2024), external link

Penumbra

  • Michael Whitmore, “Text: A Massively Addressable Object,” Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012), external link
  • Ted Underwood, “Seven Ways Humanists Are Using Computers to Understand Text” (2015), external link
  • Katherine Bode, “Abstraction, Singularity, Textuality: The Equivalence of ‘Close’ and ‘Distant’ Reading” from A World of Fiction (2018), library link
  • Scott B. Weingart, “The Route of a Text Message, a Love Story” (2019), external link
  • David A. Smith and Ryan Cordell, “Textual Criticism as Language Modeling” in Going the Rounds: Virality in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers (2019), external link
  • Quinn Dombrowski, DSC /#8: Text-Comparison-Algorithm-Crazy Quinn (2020), external link
  • James Dobson and Scott Sanders, “Distant Approaches to the Printed Page” (2022), external link
  • Rachael Scarborough King, “The Scale of Genre” (2021), library link
  • Gabi Kirilloff, “Computation as Context: New Approaches to the Close/Distant Reading Debate” (2022), library link
  • Jennifer Guiliano and Laura Estill, “What Gets Categorized Counts: Controlled Vocabularies, Digital Affordances, and the International Digital Humanities Conference” (2023), external link
  • David O. Oberhelman, “Distant Reading, Computational Stylistics, and Corpus Linguistics: The Critical Theory of Digital Humanities for Literature Subject Librarians” in Digital Humanities in the Library (2024), library link

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