Digital projects

Word embedding models: A very short introduction

A brief introduction to word embedding models, designed for literary researchers and those in related fields.

The Data-Sitters Club

An ongoing collaboration with Quinn Dombrowski (Stamford), Lee Skallerup Bessette (Georgetown), Katia Bowers (UBC), Maria Cecire (Bard) and Roopika Risam (Salem State) wihch uses the mass-market YA series The Baby-Sitters Club, which was popular in the 1980s and 90s, as a way to help introduce newcomers to digital humanities to the basics of computational text analysis. The idea, as explained by Kristy Quinn, is “to apply the computational tools and methods that are widely used in the digital humanities text analysis community to the BSC corpus, making visible all the steps and decisions that shape that path”, and “to write the whole thing up in a series of detailed but colloquial posts that could serve as a guidebook for fellow travelers.”. Read what Inside Higher Ed said about us here, and follow our tweets here.

Teaching Digital Humanities with the Medical History of British India (National Library of Scotland

The National Library of Scotland makes a range of rich datasets available through its Data Foundry portal. My 2019-20 Digital Humanities for Literary Studies MSc students used one of these datasets, the Medical History of British India, as the basis for their final project for the course.

Patrick Twite

A bot which tweets out Markov chain-generated chunks of prose redolent of the Australian novelist Patrick White. No funder, just for fun :)

Funded projects

Encoding the Vandergrifter

A digital edition of four unpublished stories by Fanny Van der Grift Stevenson, discovered in the archives by Robyn Pritzker, who did her PhD under my supervision on Fanny Stevenson’s short fiction. Includes both TEI-encoded XML files and plain text versions, along with scholarly apparatus, all of which was done by Robyn. Funder: The Centre for Data, Culture and Society, University of Edinburgh.

Working from Scraps

This project, conceptualised by Bridget Moynihan (Edinburgh) as part of her PhD research and built by her and Jonathan Armoza (NYU), produced a digital prototype based on selections from the Edwin Morgan Scrapbooks. Employing information visualisation principles to convey the thematic and semantic richness of the scrapbooks while avoiding breaching copyright, the project aimed to bring out as many of the elements of the Morgan scrapbooks as possible: their networked qualities, the manifold resonances between images and scraps of texts, the structure of individual pages and the semantic relationships and thematic preoccupations visible across the scrapbooks as a whole. Funder: The Carnegie Trust.

Beyond the Black Box

A collection of digital humanities learning resources designed for researchers in literary studies and related fields, and intended to foster statistical, algorithmic and quantitative literacy. These workshops were originally delivered by their authors at a series of advanced digital humanities workshops at the University of Edinburgh in 2017. Funder: The British Academy.


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