Week 6: Digital Humanities Network

Stanford Analysis of Digital Humanities definition using MALLET and GEPHI

Scott Weingart’s article about Demystifying Networks was both informative and eye-opening. It does seem like some digital humanists have a tendency to try and analyze everything they come into contact with. Especially with the number of resources that we’re discovering on the internet, it becomes difficult to restrain oneself from putting too much into one tool or combining the wrong sets of data with the wrong type of tool. He talks about the differences of a multimodal network and the complications with fitting a bimodal dataset into software that is meant to analyze single mode networks.

What ties back to Drucker’s article from last week is the idea that “humanistic data are almost by definition uncertain, open to interpretation, flexible, and not easily definable.” Furthermore, Weingart explains that node types are concrete and it gets difficult when a digital humanist is trying to mold data into a shape it’s not meant to be in. And it’s definitely interesting to note that depending on the context that someone views the data, it can easily distort what that data means when being placed in the network.

I found a project online from Stanford that uses the MALLET topic modeling kit to analyze a small corpus of the Digital Humanities definition by members of the DH community. Of the data collected, they were defined by faculty, graduate students, and staff in academia. The author used Gephi as well to run two separate interpretations of the data end product by MALLET. It was interesting to look at someone else’s process of analyzing text found online. Even though he didn’t address the type of network and how that shaped his methodology, it made me more aware of its potential influence and how the data can be looked at and presented differently.