Nov. 3: Digital humanities brown bag in the library

Come lunch and learn at a digital humanities-focused brown bag event. And if you’d like to explore the topic more deeply, consider attending this month’s Digital Humanities Reading Group the week before.

What
Black Women Big Data: Utilizing Topic Modeling to Understand Black Women’s Lived Experience

Speaker
Nicole Brown

When
November 2nd, 12-1

Where
308 Main Library

Description
Nicole Brown, postdoc at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, will talk about a recently completed research project that used topic modeling to examine over 1,000 documents in the HathiTrust digital library to identify general discourse in sources by or about African American women. She will discuss the process the team used to create a corpus for analysis; integrate theory with methods, specifically how they trained the topic model algorithm while incorporating Standpoint Theory; interpret quantitative results; and bridge disciplinary boundaries. Bring your lunch and learn about the innovative research happening at Illinois!

Oct. 29: IPRH Digital Humanities Reading Group

Mark your calendars!

The next meeting date for the IPRH’s Digital Humanities Reading Group will be on Thursday October 29th. This month we will be discussing the intersection of cultural criticism and topic modeling within Digital Humanities in anticipation of Nicole Brown’s DH Brown bag “Black Women Big Data: Utilizing Topic Modeling to Understand Black Women’s Lived Experience” on November 5.

Date & Location:

Thursday October 29th from 2:30-4:00PM
Room 341 of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) Building

Related Events:
DH Brownbag “Black Women Big Data: Utilizing Topic Modeling to Understand Black Women’s Lived Experience” on November 5.
http://illinois.edu/calendar/detail/4092?eventId=33017423&calMin=201510&cal=20141104&skinId=1977

Readings for discussion:

DiMaggio, P., Nag, M. and Blei, D. “Exploiting affinities between topic modeling and the sociological perspective on culture? Application to newspaper coverage of U.S. government arts funding”, Poetics 41 (2013): 570-606

Lui, A. 2012. “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”, In M. Gold (ed), Debates in Digital Humanities, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2012). Available at http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/20

For reference:
http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-1/topic-modeling-a-basic-introduction-by-megan-r-brett/

New to the group?

We are interested in developing critically grounded perspectives on what it means to do digital humanities work in various institutional contexts. As a starting point, we will examine some prominent pieces that discuss themes related to defining, critiquing, practicing, and teaching “digital” humanities. We hope to supplement these readings with additional perspectives informed by the interests, scholarship, and work of those who do digital humanities on campus. Visit our webpage at http://cirss.lis.illinois.edu/Group/group.php?id=1 or view past reading selections at https://www.zotero.org/groups/reading_dh/

[Posted on behalf of the DH Reading Group.]