Perspectives: History and Literature, Quantitative and Qualitative

• Quantitative and Qualitative Digital Research
  

  
  

  See the lecture page below for a description of two crucial aspects of digital research methods.
  
• Slides: Quant and Qual File
• Lecture: Quant and Qual Page
• Literature, History, and DH: An Overview
  

• Slides: DH Across Disciplines: Hypertext History, Literature and Interpretation File
• Lecture: DH in History and Literature Page
• Ed Ayers on digital history URL
• Jerome McGann on digital literary studies URL
• Readings

• William Thomas, 'Computing and the Historical Imagination' URL
• Katherine Bode, ‘Literary Studies in the Digital Age’ URL
• Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, 'Mixed Methodological Digital Humanities' URL
• Exercise 1: Book Worm

  1. Go to the Hathi Trust Bookworm tool: https://bookworm.htrc.illinois.edu/develop/
  

  2. Search for some word trends that you are interested in.

  3. Now go to the Hathi Trust topic explorer at https://jgoodwin.net/htb/#/model/grid

  4. Use the GUI to investigate

  • Why does the GUI help?

  • Refer to the source texts to learn more.

  • Are the topics accurate in context?

  Post your findings on our class forum or be prepared to discuss at the next seminar session.

• Exercise 2: from Git to Voyant and back

  1. Go to our GitHub repo at https://github.com/cmohge1/riga-intro-to-dh.

  2. Use the command line to clone the repo.

  3. Again use the command line to navigate to the directory with the text files, then run a command to combine all the text files into a single txt file.

  4. Upload the combined txt into Voyant Tools (https://voyant-tools.org/).

  5. Now use your own txt file, upload it to Voyant, and compare the results to the previous step.

  6. Add, commit, and push your personal txt file(s) from (5) into our GitHub repo.