Recent Posts
- 13 Nov 2022 » Endless Monument
Endless Monument is an experimental poetry project that displays Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion one line at a time. It began as a Twitter bot in 2014 and has since moved to its own webpage:
Read more... - 16 Jun 2020 » Working with Humanities Data in Google Sheets
Designed in response to a few Google Sheets-based digital humanities projects, this short guide details some ways to use Sheets to categorize and compute on the kind of data humanities scholars often collect. Though some of these functions will work in other spreadsheet programs (like Microsoft Excel and LibreOffice Calc), other functions—especially QUERY()—will only work in Google Sheets.
Read more... - 25 May 2020 » Network Glossary
Below is a glossary of basic terms used in social network analysis. This list was first compiled for a webinar as part of the Getty Advanced Workshop on Network Analysis and Digital Art History in 2020, but the terms and definitions offered here should be useful to anyone starting out with a humanities network project.
Read more... - 23 Jul 2019 » Analyzing Drama Networks with Machine Learning
This is the text of my portion of a talk for the Association for Computers and the Humanities conference, co-presented with Matt Lavin on 25 April 2019. This post includes just the introduction and my portion of the presentation. You can find Matt’s portion of the talk in this post.
Read more... - 17 Apr 2018 » Learning to Ask Questions in DH: A Twitter Thread
I haven’t kept up with regular posts here, mostly because many (all?) of the conversations I have online regarding my work are happening on Twitter these days. This naturally gives way to the occasionally Twitter thread—basically a blog post divided into several tweets.
Read more... - 10 Nov 2015 » Writing a Dissertation in Markdown
I started writing my dissertation this semester, and the beginning of this big new project prompted me to take a close look at the tools I use to write. As I was figuring out what my workflow would be for the next few years, I found it helpful to read blog posts and essays about the working habits of others. My favorite was Ben Schmidt’s convincing post on the value of Markdown, and I wound up adopting a method that is close to his recommendations (and to the recommendations of the people he links to in that post).
Read more... - 31 Jul 2015 » Bad Blood: John Dryden, Taylor Swift, and Lyrical Gossip
Perhaps the heat has finally gotten to me, or maybe I’m looking for a late summer distraction before the school year starts again in earnest, but lately I’ve been seeing a lot of similarities between John Dryden and Taylor Swift.
Read more... - 22 Jul 2015 » Edmund Spenser and Optical Character Recognition
All DH tasks, even the most automated ones, are supported by the efforts of human investigators, who often spend countless hours entering and cleaning up data. At the HDW summer workshop, teams of faculty, staff, librarians, and undergraduate and graduate students spend 8 weeks sharing this kind of work on a wide array of digital projects.
Read more... - 25 Jul 2014 » @endlessmonument, A Twitter Bot for Spenser's Epithalamion
In the Epithalamion, a wedding ode written to commemorate Spenser’s marriage to Elizabeth Boyle in 1595, the poet implies that he has created a talismanic protection for himself and his new bride. This protection is derived from the synchronicity with time that Spenser built into the poem. With 24 stanzas and 365 long lines, the Epithalamion’s surface-level organization by the length of both the day and the year is obvious, but it wasn’t until A. Kent Hieatt’s 1960 book Short Time’s Endless Monument that the complexities of Spenser’s temporal arrangement were made visible to modern readers. Hieatt shows that Spenser accounts for the specific conditions of time at the location of his wedding, including the exact moment of sunrise and sunset on the day of the wedding, St. Barnabas’ Day, the slight difference between diurnal and sidereal measurements of time, and divisions in the day (quarter-hours) and the year (seasons). These and other elements of Spenser’s fine tuning, which went undetected for nearly 400 years, reveal a poet deeply committed to encoding the marriage ode to a specific place and time.
Read more... - 05 Jan 2014 » On Learning to Code
As part of a course in the digital humanities that I took last semester, I learned the basics of Python and completed a project using the programming language to analyze metrical patterns in Shakespeare’s sonnets. As the popularity of the digital humanities and literary informatics grows, my experience is becoming less and less unique. More people like me, who have a background in the humanities and thought they left math and science far behind, are trying their hands at coding for the first time.
Read more... - 26 Nov 2013 » Productive Procrastination
This blog is the result of my procrastination. I’ve spent the evening building it instead of working on seminar papers, because I needed a break and wanted to try out Jekyll. I used to have a Tumblr instead of a real website, but I wanted more control and less reliance on a platform. (Also, I wasn’t really maintaining it.) As I learn more, the site may look different, but for now the simple look is refreshing.
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