About this Blog-like Thing

September 01, 2016

Since the late 1990s, the business world and academia alike have seen the rise of the data scientist. Though the term data science dates back to early 1960s, figure of the data scientist took on additional cache with the popularization of the World Wide Web and the data revolution that accompanied it.

The Alice Problem

December 15, 2016

Not very long ago, one of my colleagues hired a programmer for his institution's digital humanities initiative. In advertising the position, he designed a set of three challenges designed to test candidates for baseline competency with programming as it might apply to the humanities.

Diagnosis: Neologophobia

June 01, 2017

With the spring semester over, I've been coming back to a project I haven't worked on in almost a year.

Computational Methods in Authorship Studies

August 01, 2017

What follows is a copy of my remarks from a talk at Duquesne University in February 2017.

Book Reviews as Data

October 01, 2017

In May of 1905, a review of <em>The Troll Garden</em>, Willa Cather’s first published collection of short stories, appeared in <em>The New York Times</em>

Terms and Conditions for a Culture of Open Data

December 27, 2017

This post is response to Andrew Piper's recent "An Open Letter to the MLA"

You Should Write a Book

June 06, 2019

This summer I've been turning my attention back to my book project, which has been slowly taking shape for several years.

Are You Sure This is a Good Idea? If So, Why?

June 10, 2019

In my last post, I discussed Paul Silvia's <em>How to Write a Lot</em> and promised to describe my book project in greater detail ...

Willa Cather and The New York Times Book Review

June 22, 2019

A copy of my recent conference presentation at the 2019 Cather International Seminar

Analyzing Lots of Book Reviews and Extracting Information

July 15, 2019

For the past four weeks (minus a week for Willa Cather camp), I've been doing some experiments with a large corpus of book reviews.

New Horizons in Network Analysis: Machine Learning for Classification and Clustering

August 01, 2019

My presentation for the "New Horizons in Network Analysis" panel at the 2019 meeting of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH)

Extracting Information from Book Reviews by Creating Review Profiles

September 03, 2019

More on my efforts to classify items as likely to be reviews and extract key information from book reviews, such as the reviewed author, the reviewed title, the book's publisher, the price, the likely genre, etc.