http://library.nd.edu/cds/dhseries/

Join the DH reading group and workshop series Tuesday, May 3, for our last session of the semester as we consider JSTOR Data for Research (DfR) and topic modeling. JSTOR has made strides to support the “big data” drive of digital humanities with their Data for Research Service, but what can one really do with it? A group of literature scholars including Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood used topic modeling to analyze the history of literary scholarship through JSTOR DfR, raising fascinating questions along the way. What is topic modeling? Can it really tell us anything significant about the history of scholarship? And how might we use JSTOR DfR ourselves? Come discuss!

All are invited: no advanced computing experience is required.

Readings: Bite-size blog post: “What can topic models of PMLA teach us about the history of literary scholarship?” [LINK HERE]. If you read nothing else, give this a glimpse.

Optional: A slightly longer article from New Literary History for those so inclined: “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us” [LINK HERE].

And for a more recent use of DfR in 18th-century studies, check out “Enlightenment Scholarship by the Numbers: dfr.jstor.org, Dirty Quantification, and the Future of the Lit Review” by Dan Edelstein [LINK HERE]