Thursday, February 3, 2022

What's in the Hathi Trust?

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(This is a post I've had unpublished since writing it in 2016. Just hitting publish without reviewing right now because it's somethi...
1 comment:
Sunday, February 10, 2019

How badly is Google Books search broken, and why?

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I periodically write about Google Books here, so I thought I'd point out something that I've noticed recently that should be concern...
4 comments:
Thursday, August 23, 2018

Some preliminary analysis of the Texas salary-by-major data.

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I did a slightly deeper dive into data about the salaries by college majors while working on my new Atlantic article on the humanities crisi...
2 comments:
Friday, July 27, 2018

Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities

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NOTE 8/23: I've written a more thoughtful version of this argument for the Atlantic.  They're not the same, but if you only read one...
37 comments:
Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Google Books and the open web.

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Historians generally acknowledge that both undergraduate and graduate methods training need to teach students how to navigate and understand...
3 comments:
Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Meaning chains with word embeddings

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Matthew Lincoln recently put up a Twitter bot that walks through chains of historical artwork by vector space similarity. https://twitter.co...
1 comment:
Friday, September 15, 2017

"Peer review" is younger than you think. Does that mean it can go away?

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This is a blog post I've had sitting around in some form for a few years; I wanted to post it today because: 1) It's about peer r...
5 comments:
Monday, July 24, 2017

Population Density 2: Old and New New England

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Digging through old census data, I realized that Wikipedia has some really amazing town-level historical population data, particularly for t...
5 comments:
Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Population Density 1: Do cities have a land area? And a literal use of the Joy Division map

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I've been doing a lot of reading about population density cartography recently. With election-map cartography remaining a major issue, t...
Wednesday, July 5, 2017

What is described as belonging to the "public" versus the "government?"

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Robert Leonard has an op-ed in the Times today that includes the following anecdote: Out here some conservatives aren’t even calling them...
Tuesday, May 16, 2017

A brief visual history of MARC cataloging at the Library of Congress.

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The Library of Congress has released MARC records that I'll be doing more with over the next several months to understand the books and ...
22 comments:
Friday, April 14, 2017

The history of looking at data visualizations

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One of the interesting things about contemporary data visualization is that the field has a deep sense of its own history, but that "pr...
4 comments:
Friday, December 23, 2016

Some notes on corpora for diachronic word2vec

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I want to post a quick methodological note on diachronic (and other forms of comparative) word2vec models. This is a really interesting fi...
Tuesday, December 20, 2016

OCR failures in 2016

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This is a quick digital-humanities public service post with a few sketchy questions about OCR as performed by Google. When I started worki...
Thursday, December 1, 2016

A 192-year heatmap of presidential elections with a y axis ordering you have to see to believe

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Like everyone else, I've been churning over the election results all month. Setting aside the important stuff, understanding election re...