Digital Humanities (DH) is a fairly new, trending topic that many seem to be experimenting with. Below is a list of some things that need to be kept in mind when delving into the world of DH:

1) Your topic should be of relevance to a larger community. The whole world now has access to all your information. Don’t you want at least some people to care about all of it?

2) Your project or site should be user friendly. Again, the whole world can see this. Don’t you want them to be able to navigate it? What’s the point of having all of this relevant information out there if no one can figure out how to use it?

3) There should be a theme. Your project should not just be a random assortment of facts. Your viewers will be confused as to what they are supposed to get out of it and will therefore, not care about it.

4) Grammar is still important! While this is the internet, and on social media sites it has become more and more acceptable to use “slang”, the DH community is an academic community and you want your readers to be able to understand the point you are trying to get across.

5) Plagiarism is still a crime! Cite everything that is not your original thought! Plagiarism is a crime with severe consequences that still apply to information you post online!

What makes a good DH project?

Aside from all the traits listed above, there are still other important factors to a good DH project. Your project should be easily navigated. Your readers and viewers should not have to do work, you should have done all the work for them. Make sure it is easy for them to find all of the information on your site! Your project should also be aesthetically appealing, but the colors and themes should not make the information hard to view/read.

How does DH let scholars ask new questions?

Well, the obvious answer is that there is more information, and the information is much more accessible to everyone. DH allows everyone to view the information that in the past had to be physically shared with you and wasn’t as easily found. Today, you can find another just by clicking a few buttons. When everyone has the information, the logical outcome is that more questions will be asked. Also, when everyone has all the information, scholars can ask questions within their projects. Whether it’s an interactive site or just a survey, scholars can get non-scholars answers now.

Looking for mentions in Sherlock Holmes’ stories I came across Leadenhall Street that appears in A Case of Identity when Miss Sutherland tell Holmes:

“Oh, yes, Mr. Holmes. We were engaged after the first walk that we took. Hosmer—Mr. Angel—was a cashier in an office in Leadenhall Street—and—”

I used Locating London to map the crimes commited by women in Leadenhall Street and that was my result.

Most of the crimes were theft and only 2 of them were royal offences. When I searched for all the genders I noticed that theft was the most popular crime in the area and there were a total of 90 crimes registered in this street.

But back to my previous search and looking through the items one caught my attention because it’s punishment was public whipping. The woman was Elizabeth Bond and she was accused of stealing three pewter pint mugs in 14th January 1768. Mrs. Bond deffended herself saying “These pots were lying in the street, I saw them as I was coming by, and put them in to my apron, by that reason I could not tell where to carry them; as to striking them, I never did no more than I do this moment.” * but she was considered guilty anyway.

The full record can be found here.

After checking the crimes I decided to see how Leadenhall Street was classified by Charle’s Booth but what I noticed is that it is not classified at all.

Searching more thoroughly I found out that it happened because all Charlies Booth’s entries were from workers and the place was mostly mercantile as we can see from the entries below.

I tried to use Historical Eye and British Histories but they didn’t show me any relevant information about the street so I decided not to use them.

Works cited

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey case t17680114-42 (reference number)

Charlie’s Booth Survey Notebook – Link

Using MALLET, I was able to Topic Model the canon of Sherlock Holmes stories. Once the program was set up, I changed the configuration to use 50 “Number of Topics,” 1000 “Number of Iterations,” and 20 topic words printed. I then fed in all the Sherlock Holmes stories. With these settings, MALLET gave me fifty different topics, each topic having twenty different words in them. From these fifty topics, I choose ten of the more obvious topics and named them. These are the following:

TOPICS:

Monetary Transactions

• Business, money, make, hundred, asked, man, year, England, company, pounds, pay, thousand, friends, fifty, lived, ten, gold, paid, price, named

Discovering a Murder

• Found, dead, man, body, crime, death, murder, police, bloody, finally, blow, knife, tragedy, lay, weapon, criminal, murderer, terrible, committed, scene

Presenting Cases to Holmes

• Matter, understand, family, gave, brought, trust, complete, confidence, force, absolute, question, son, save, promise, happy, taking, honour, roof, reputation, private

Dinner Party

• House, night, live, people, large, master, servant, evening, servants, household, purpose, dinner, lodge, baynes, enter, high, Garcia, gregson, scott, children

In a Bedroom

• Room, window, bed, night, sitting, entered, bedroom, morning, open, heard, dressing, lawn, moment, sleep, drawing, rose, upstairs, gown, rooms, smoking

Waiting for a Taxi

• Street, half, back, hour, past, baker, waiting, cab, quarter, ten, minutes, waited, drive, found, reach, waking, reach, hurried, passing, presently

Standing at a Door

• Door, open, opened, heard, light, key, stood, closed, sound, passage, led, inside, room, locked, step, heavy, stair, hall, lock, instant

Stationary

• Paper, note, letter, read, papers, table, box, handed, written, book, wrote, writing, letters, happened, write, sheet, post, document, slip, pocket

Travel

• House, road, hall, place, side, front, walked, carriage, windows, round, led, garden, miles, drove, houses, yards, direction, drive, walk, cottage

Detective

• Case, lestrade, evidence, mystery, yard, points, theory, afraid, arrest, facts, effect, Scotland, undoubtedly, difficulty, prisoner, innocent, charge, simple, probably, disappearance

I was then able to experiment with the settings to see different results. As I began to increase the number of iterations, the process began to take longer and longer, until I didn’t really have the time to wait for it. I think the last successful trial was one with 2000 “Number of Iterations.”

At first I had thought that having twenty words in each topic was a bit too much, so I experimented with decreasing this number. By doing this I learned that having less words in each topic often began to make the process more difficult. Sometimes a smaller group of words isn’t enough to successfully establish a trend, and thus a topic. There may be a better number to use than twenty, but it seems to be a pretty fine line. And, of course, not all of the topics I received with using twenty as the number of words in each topic were very good. Out of the fifty topics I received, I was really only able to find ten topics that made any sense to me, and even those may be pushing the proverbial envelope.

As for Topic Modeling, I went into this experiment as a skeptic and I did not really leave any more confident in the process. What Topic Modeling does is take a large number of files, looks through all of the words, then puts certain words in groups. The words in groups are suppose to have a common theme, and thus they are meant to tell you something about the group of text as a whole. I am skeptical about this process because words, when put together, don’t always mean what they may mean if you take them in a literal sense. Examples of this are figurative language such as idioms and metaphors. I’m not sure if the algorithm used in MALLET takes this into consideration, but I wouldn’t think it does. So, if this is the case, MALLET could still be a great program (it really is a great program) and Topic Modeling could still be very useful, but only in the cases where everything is literal. That being said, Topic Modeling has it’s limits just like everything else has it’s limits, and it still may be a great tool to distant read.

Hello again everybody. This week we worked on our Book Traces. We were asked to hunt down books in the library that had different writings or markings inside of them. The idea behind this stems from the question, what is a book? Some could argue that it is a collection of words and we could throw those words onto a Kindle, Nook, or some other electronic reader. But really we’ve discovered that books are much more than that. They are made of different materials, they age over time, and of course, the reader may interact with it in ways that will go unnoticed and lost forever unless documented by projects such as Book Traces.

I know some people found their subjects pretty quickly, I was not so lucky. I had to search about 15 books before finding one I was happy with. Not that I minded though, scouring through the library turned out to be a fun way to learn about what books have to offer us beyond the original publication. The book I eventually found is Bullet and Shell: War as the Soldier Saw it by Geo F. Williams with illustrations by Edwin Forbes.

Bullet and Shell is a book about the American Civil War told mostly through the soldiers’ perspectives. The marginalia I discovered was an inscription on the first page of the book. Although in cursive and not entirely legible, it appears to read, “In remembrance of Harry … Brant Christmas 1919 …”

There isn’t much to go on, but I wondered who Harry Brant was. Perhaps he was a soldier who passed away the previous year to the inscription in the first World War. Or maybe he is an ancestor who gave his life in the Civil War. Although no concrete answers can be determined, it is fascinating to think of the human level of emotion that may have transpired from whoever received this book (presumably as a gift on Christmas).

Last note: I’m posting this just after noon on Sunday, October 5th. As of now my page hasn’t made it onto the site just yet, but I will edit back here with the link once it is up.