Sapping Attention

Let me get back into the blogging swing with a (too long—this is why I can't handle Twitter, folks) reflection on an offhand comment. Do...

Before end-of-semester madness, I was looking at how shifts in vocabulary usage occur. In many cases, I found, vocabulary change doesn't...

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how ancestry.com structured census data for genealogy, not history, and how that limits what historians ...

All the cool kids are talking about shortcomings in digitized text databases. I don't have anything so detailed to say as what Goose Com...

Let's start with two self-evident facts about how print culture changes over time: The words that writers use change. Some words flare ...

Shane Landrum (@cliotropic) says my claim that historians have different digital infrastructural needs than other fields might be provocat...

When I first thought about using digital texts to track shifts in language usage over time, the largest reliable repository of e-texts was P...

Let me step away from digital humanities for just a second to say one thing about the Cronon affair . (Despite the professor-blogging angle...

Back from Venice (which is plastered with posters for "Mapping the Republic of Letters," making a DH-free vacation that much harde...

I've been thinking for a while about the transparency of digital infrastructure, and what historians need to know that currently is only...

Here's an animation of the PCA numbers I've been exploring this last week . There's quite a bit of data built in here, and j...

I wanted to see how well the vector space model of documents I've been using for PCA works at classifying individual books. [Note at the...

I used principal components analysis at the end of my last post to create a two-dimensional plot of genre based on similarities in word us...

One of the most important services a computer can provide for us is a different way of reading. It's fast, bad at grammar, good at count...

I've spent a lot of the last week trying to convince Princeton undergrads it's OK to occasionally disagree with each other, even if...