Patricia Cohen of the New York Times has been working on an excellent series on digital humanities, and her second article focuses on our text mining work on Victorian books, which was directly enabled by a grant from Google and more broadly enabled by a previous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to explore text mining in history. I’m glad Cohen (no relation) captured the nuances and caveats as well as the potential of digital methods. I also liked how the graphics department did a great job converting and explaining some of our graphs.
I previously posted a rough transcript of my talk on Victorian history and literature that Cohen mentions in the piece. She also covered my work earlier this year in an article on peer review that was much debated in academia.
Comments
My e-book, entitled What ARE We Talking About When We Talk About “Race”? is an Amazon Kindle e-book. It relates to an exhibition distributed by Syracuse University entitled “All of Us Are Related, Each of Us is Unique. These, and other publications of mine describe the word “RACE” as a social construct, rather than a biological reality. Accordingly, I am interested in tracing the use of the word “Race” through history.
Your project would be a model for a digital search for that history. Can you assist me in pursuing this possibility and, in particular, suggesting how I nmight communicate with the appropriate Google sources for possible asistance.
Thank you. Marshall Segall, Professor Emeritus, syracuse University
@Marshall: Hopefully at some time in the near future (I assume after the Google Books settlement) everyone will be able to do these kinds of queries. For now, however, you need to get a Google Digital Humanities grant to get this level of access.
[…] Cohen links the New York Times‘s coverage of the Victorian Books Project at the Digital Humanities blog (be sure to check out the link to Cohen’s transcribed paper on […]