Today we had our second DH Open Office Hours session! Our session focused on the tools we use for DH. We talked about how the NULab graduate symposium will be working heavily with text analysis for the semester, and as a result, they’ll be working with R and Python. We also talked about the tools the Viral Texts project works with with for their text analysis, which builds visualizations about what, and how, news stories went viral in the 19th Century.
A good text to know if you’re interested about learning R is called Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature.
We did notice that there’s a problem with a lot of out-of-the box tools for DH projects – they either don’t scale up well to large or complicated projects, or you have to start completely from scratch and custom code a tool. If you come to future meetings, we’d love to hear more opinions or solutions on this!
We also had a few cool links sent to us by Jim McGrath! There’s a pretty neat tool called import.io that allows you extract data from websites.
We also brought up a great blog for people who are interested in DH and DH tools but don’t know where to start: Miriam Posner’s How Did They Make That?
There’s also a DH event coming up very soon: The Boston University Digital Humanities 2015 Symposium. A few Northeastern graduate students are already planning to attend, and the keynote on Friday is being given by the DSG’s very own Julia Flanders! We want to encourage you to attend, since the event is free will be a very interesting set of conversations about the world of Digital Humanities.
More information on DH Open Office Hours can be found at our event and wiki pages. If you have questions email us at DSG@neu.edu or contact us on Twitter @NU_DSG.
Post by Abbie Levesque, Digital Scholarship Group Coordinator.