Group: Alessandra Oestreich and Isabelle Berta
Class Blog 2
Digital Humanities Projects
- User friendly interface: Your project must be easy and acessible for people that are not experts. If your website, for example, is too complicated then people won’t know how to use all its features and some of your work can be never seen or never found.
- Realiable information: One important thing is that all the information in your project must be truth and don’t express only your personal opinion. Search tons of infomation to get as many as you can, cite them correctly, make a biblyography and if you want express your opinion based on what you found and very briefly. Let people create their own opinion based on what they found on your project.
- Focus: Focus on the theme you want. If you digress a lot people might lose interest and the objective of your project will get lost along the way.
- Visually appealing: Your project must be pleasurable to look at. If you have a messy aestethics people will lose the interest to look through it. So even if your project is really good, you will still lose audience.
- Easily navigable: People must be able to easily understand and find what they want in your project without that much effort. It’s always good to have a search engine so they can navigate better and go straight foward to what they are looking for without wasting too much time.
Analysing all the previous characteristcs and looking at all the digital humanities projects you can notice that a good digital humanities project is made not only thinking about the data you wanna show itself but it must be made think about who will see and use it. A good project is reliable, visually appealing and focused on one especific theme so people can earn from your project tons of information that they would never be able to find so easily without it.
This kind of project reunites a lot of information in one place, a lot of them information that has never been digitalized before and this helps researches for scholars. For example, Locating London. It reunites tons of informations of old london going from crimes to the density of the population by area. This is can be found in a unique place and compared, giving scholars new ways to see the data and come up with more questions that if they had to search different places and come up with the individual conclusion of the data they found.
Topic Modeling
How does the number of topics affect the topics the tool gives you?
Changing the number of topics allows it to vary ont the granularity of produced topics.
How does the number of iterations affect the topics the tool gives you?
The higher the number of iterations the higher the topic coherence.
What settings do you recommend for use with the Topic Modeling Tool?
10-20 topics
>100 iterations
Remove stopwords
Solving: case point facts points fact obvious interest explanation investigation mystery simple confess theory present admit solution formed true problem connection
- What story uses that topic the most? The Dancing Men
- Which stories use it less? The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax
- What is the most common word from this topic in the story?
- Why some words are repeated?
Crime: man dead poor strong body death life brought terrible dangerous sort words creature real deep notice wild turn devil lies
- What story uses that topic the most? The Veiled Lodger
- Which stories use it less? The Reigate Squires
- Why do you think this is topic is more used in this story?
- What is the relation of the words and topic and their stories?
Murder Case: crime police found murder death night scene arrest reason attention remained trace instantly murderer attempt suspicion discovered charge caused search
- What story uses that topic the most? The Second Stain
- Which stories use it less? The Devil’s Foot
- Why are there some words that are not related with the topic?
- How does the topic modeling tool help us with the understanding of the story?
By Alessandra Oestreich and Isabelle Berta
Topic Modeling: Sherlock Holmes
Looking at the topics I selected earlier this week I could notice that even if in some cases there are words that are repeated or some words that shouldn’t be on the topic, the topic tool is really effective and give us a good general idea.
For example if you look at the topic that I named Mr. Watson:
watson case find point friend doubt sherlock interest facts remarkable fact singular remarked account dear strange present points curious reason
You can link most of the words with the character. For example, he is Shelock Holmes’ friend, interested in the facts of the case, he points things that Sherlock says and sometimes has doubt about it.
Some other topics for example can show us some steps of solving a case:
case point facts points fact obvious interest explanation investigation mystery simple confess theory present admit solution formed true problem connection
First of all you have the case and then you have to point the facts and even take in account the obvious ones.In the end of it you need to have and explanation for the mistery that the case is. You can start by having a theory of what happened or by investigating the victim’s connections or maybe follow a clue of a confession to get to the true story. It doens’t matter your choice of technique but you need to solve the problem.
Obviously some topics can be a little messy and don’t mean anything at all but this tool is really helpfull. I tried to set as many iterations as I could and it was really fun seeing the result.
Sherlock Holmes and Topic Modeling
50 topics, 1000 iterations, and 20 words printed
Person: face eyes features turned lips looked tall pale white mouth expression drawn raised gray set beard fixed forehead glance angry
30 topics, 1500 iterations, and 20 words printed
Case: case lestrade find evidence points remarked obvious matter investigation mystery yard affair facts fresh point explain theory fact clue give
Crime: man dead poor strong body death life brought terrible dangerous sort words creature real deep notice wild turn devil lies
Thinking: mind clear remember place chance idea professor things strange full fear pass began aware put change doubt wrong lie fall
10 topics, 5000 iterations, and 20 words printed
Mr. Watson: watson case find point friend doubt sherlock interest facts remarkable fact singular remarked account dear strange present points curious reason
60 topics, 20000 iterations, and 20 words printed
Business/time: years money ago hundred twenty year ten time business months age pay week pounds thirty thousand gold weeks month fifty
Documents: paper note letter read table box book handed written papers wrote letters writing sheet write slip post document date envelope
Murder Case: crime police found murder death night scene arrest reason attention remained trace instantly murderer attempt suspicion discovered charge caused search
Senses: light long dark suddenly lamp black sound sudden darkness held silent hand shadow figure thrown appeared match silence ears lantern
Solving: case point facts points fact obvious interest explanation investigation mystery simple confess theory present admit solution formed true problem connection
Juxta Editions: The Red-Headed League
Book Traces
Looking around the library I came across some interesting book marginalias. Most of them were the name of the owner of the book or some notes about it. If you looked around the pages you could probably notice some more notes inside the book but most of them were more recent written by pen and for sure not from the 19th century. To make sure I was getting the right marginalias I relied on dates written on it that assured me the authenticity.
The first book I found was Poems by James Russell Lowell published in 1885, New York.
The first pages had a lot of annotations. Unfortunatelly it is not so easy to understand them because of the way they were written. The first one looked like a list of things to read, but that is an personal opinion, I not 100% sure. The first one doesn’t have the but the handwritting is the same as the second one that has a date.
The second page starts with “To my girls” followed by New York, Oct. 24th 1889.
The second book is Tragedy of Othello by William Shakespeare and was published in 1886, New York.
On the first page you can notice the name of the original owner of the book, Nellie J. Bates from March 1887. Unfortunatelly I couldn’t find anything about the person.
The third book is The Poetical Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes published in 1890, England.
The first page has the name of the owner, place (Cambridge) and date (1897). Nothing was found about the owner too.
Google Fusion Table – The Greatest Fiction Since 1900
“A Scandal in Bohemia” Word Cloud
Many people hold word clouds, wordle in particular, in a negative light. While I agree that, yes, sometimes word clouds can complicate things more than they clear things up and make posts look messy, if done correctly they can be quite useful.
Above is a word cloud of the short story A Scandal in Bohemia, by Arthur Conan Doyle. I used wordle to create this visual because I knew how to work it and I found it was best suited for what I wanted to do. If someone were to look at this word cloud, they would already know that the story was about Sherlock Holmes, a king, and a photograph because those are the biggest words in the cloud. The black and white color scheme makes it easier to read because the black words stand out against the white background. I enjoyed picking which font to use, though it was frustrating because a lot of them were very hard to read. I picked this font because I felt it had more of a Victorian feel than any of the others. So, right off the bat, someone would already know that this Sherlock story was about a king and a photograph, and also, if he was using his context clues, that it was written a long time ago.
I think word clouds are best left to help someone get a basic understanding of a book or of an idea, not to be used in a serious argument unless it is absolutely necessary. All and all, there is a time and a place for word clouds, and if you’re a beginner with web tools, wordle can be very useful.
The Red-Headed League
The Red-Headed League is a story that takes place in Victorian England, a period that was mainly characterized by insecurity, largely due to the Industrial Revolution. Seeking for jobs and better conditions of life, thousands of poor people had been driven to the cities and when they were given an important opportunity of job they tended not to miss it.
This fact was largely explored in the story when Mr. Jabez Wilson is offered to apply for a job that paid £4 per week for a purely nominal service. But after some weeks of regular job the place closes without apparent reasons with no more than a note at the door saying “The Read-Headed League is Dissolved – October 9, 1890” and this takes Mr. Wilson to look for Sherlock Holmes to find out what had happened. As the story succeeds, Holmes begins to unravel the mystery through his famous observation techniques and lives up to his reputation as a brilliant detective.
In the last paragraph of the story, Holmes quoted from a letter from Gustave Flaubert written to George Sand. The original quote is “L’homme n’est Rien l’Oeuvre Tout” (the man is nothing, the work is everything), but Holmes mistakenly says it as “L’homme c’est rien – l’Oeuvre c’est tout.”. Despite the mistake, the original meaning of the quote was preserved to remind us of the relation between work and man in Victorian England.
The word cloud presented in this post was generated by Wordle and show us the most common words presented in The Red-Headed League story. As in most of Sherlock Holmes’ stories, the word ‘Holmes’ is the most common word presented followed by keywords for example ‘advertisement’, ‘Wilson’ and etc. I must say that at first I was surprised that ‘red-headed’ did not show up as one of the most common words. However, as I looked closely at the story I noticed that it was only mentioned in key moments and even if it shares a part of the focus of the story it is not the most important, having no need to be repeated many times.
The Red-Headed League was a good story to read because it shows us that different times and situations change the way people react either by different ideology or by necessity. Giving us different point of views of the humanity itself.