A post back in June on “digital humanities” discussed the promises and perils of turning to “Big Data” to answer questions about American history. I focused there on a study that looked specifically at the history of American literature. A paper in Psychological Science this August uses the same tool – the Ngram function in … Continue reading »
Ngram
Novel data: promise and perils
“Big Data” and “Digital Humanities” are two of the hot terms – “with a bullet,” as they used to say on the pop music charts – in the academy these days. The terms label a variety of projects: preserving large archives by digitizing them and crunching vast amounts of raw data to address topics in … Continue reading »