The new Japanese reign name of Reiwa 令和 was released on April 1, and the compound immediately provoked consternation. What exactly does “reiwa” mean? Japanese government officials have focused on the second character, meaning “harmony.” PM Abe Shinzō, for example, explained that “Culture is nurtured when people bring their hearts together in a beautiful way. […]
This post continues a dialogue between Mark Ravina and TJ Greer on text mining and the recent student protest movement. In this entry we examine the potential for sentiment analysis. Mark: I’m somewhat cynical about sentiment analysis. How much of the emotional valence of a document can really be captured by counting adjectives? But I […]
This is the first of a series of blog post applying text mining and other DH techniques to the evolving student protest movement demanding racial equality. What can DH techniques tell use about student demands and administration responses? Are faculty and students talking to each other or at each other? This project is a collaborative […]
In a previous post I suggested that historians should use quantitative methods less to answer existing questions than to pose new ones. Such a digital humanities (DH) approach would be the reverse of the older social science history approach, in which social science tools were use to “answer” definitively longstanding questions. This post offers another example […]
What’s most striking about Leon Wieseltier’s essay in the New York Times Book review is how it confirms almost every cliché about the humanities as technophobic, insular, and reactionary. Not to mention some stereotypes about grouchy old men. Now I should confess at the outset to being a longtime Wieseltier cynic. His misreadings of popular […]
In fall 2014 I taught a freshman seminar on data visualization entitled “Charts, Maps, and Graphs.” Over the course of the semester I worked with the students to create vizs that passed Tukey’s “intra-ocular trauma” test: the results should hit you between the eyes. Over the coming months I’ll be blogging based on their final […]
In TV and movies men talk more than women, and women talk mostly about men. Hence the Bechdel test. But I thought I’d do a dataviz for this phenomenon using Ben Schmidt’s implementation of Bookworm. His data scraper uses the Open Subtitles database of closed captioned subtitles for hundreds of TV shows. While it can’t […]
My nasty “cold” has been diagnosed as Influenza A, so it’s bed rest for 48 hours. And, of course, blogging about why Ebola gets all the news but not good ‘ol killers like influenza. I got CDC figures for deaths and then ran Google searches for the related terms, totaling the number of hits. I was […]
The Guardian recently posted a dataviz comparing Ebola to other infectious diseases. It’s from a forthcoming book entitled Knowledge is Beautiful and it is indeed beautiful. Unfortunately, it’s a really bad viz. Below is my alternative viz (using the Guardian’s data), along with a critique. The basic issue is evolution. Because viruses reproduce quickly so they’re a great […]
Playing around with the new ngramr package for R, I came up with a simple viz for both the sushi boom and the rise of US foodie culture. Sometime a picture is worth a thousand words, but a least sushi is low in calories.