Digital Humanities Working Group

ENCYCLOPEDIC TIME: A WORKSHOP

Peter Logan (Temple University)

March 25^th, 2016
Nygren Studio, Library West, 2–3pm

Peter Logan will lead a works-in-progress Digital Humanities workshop on using computational textual analysis to analyze changes in the nature of knowledge across time in C19, a DH project analyzing historical editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
What can encyclopedias tell us about the changing nature of knowledge in the nineteenth century? This workshop looks at the pilot stage of a large research project designed to track changes in key cultural concepts by applying textual analysis tools to historic editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, from 1797-1911. This project seeks to identify broad patterns in the changing shape of knowledge over time by looking at the language used to explain major scientific and cultural concepts. Does the complexity of language increase as the century progresses? Are there generic distinctions between changes in the humanities and sciences or do they follow overlapping paths? Answers to these questions lie in the future, but this workshop will explore the design of the pilot study and any preliminary results from it. We will also talk about the history of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the advantages of working with continuously-revised documents instead of primary sources. We will also touch briefly on the different types of textual analysis being used, including dynamic topic modeling, an algorithm specifically designed to analyze topics that change over time.

Recommended Reading

1. Moretti, “Style, Inc.” from Distant Reading.
2. Andrew Piper and M. Algee-Hewitt, “The Werther Effect I: Goethe, Objecthood, and the Handling of Knowledge,” in Distant Readings : Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Erlin and Tatlock (2014).
3. A. Goldstone and T. Underwood, “What Can Topic Models of PMLA Teach Us About the History of Literary Scholarship?” Jrnl of Digital Humanities 2.1 (2012). http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-1/what-can-topic-models-of-pmla-teach-us-by-ted-underwood-and-andrew-goldstone/

Professor Logan, of the English Department, is the Academic Director of the Digital Scholarship Center at Temple University and the former Director of the Center for the Humanities at Temple. He teaches Victorian literature, the history of the novel, and digital humanities. He is the author of Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (SUNY, 2009), and Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (University of California Press, 1997), as well as Editor of the Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel.

This lecture is sponsored by the Albert Brick Professor.