Tuesday, September 27, 12:30-1:45PM
MITH Seminar Room, McKeldin Library B0131
“Computational Historiography in a Century of Classics Journals” by DAVID MIMNO
What do you do with a book? Until recently, this has not been a
difficult question, but the creation of massive databases of digitized
documents has begun to enable researchers to explore new
possibilities. Text can be seen not just as words to be read but as
data to be measured. In this dialog, Mimno will present some examples of
the use of computational methods to analyze 100 years of journal
articles from JStor. Mimno will then consider how to extend this case
study to general practice. How can we empower scholars to formulate
hypotheses and test them experimentally, all while maintaining
appropriate caution and skepticism?
The talk will be held in the MITH Seminar Room, in the basement of McKeldin Library.
David Mimno is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science
department at Princeton University. His research is on data mining in
text collections, with a focus on computational approaches to the
Humanities. As a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst he wrote the topic modeling package in the MALLET machine
learning toolkit. Prior to graduate school, he was Head Programmer at
the Perseus Project at Tufts University, where he designed and
implemented the current Perseus web interface (Hopper 4.0). David’s
work is supported by a Digital Humanities Research grant from Google
and a Computing Innovation fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Coming up @MITH 10/04: Robert K. Nelson (Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond), “Hardtack and Software: Topic Modeling Civil War Newspapers”
A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues webpage.
Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions.
All talks free and open to the public! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.
Contact: Emma Millon, Community Lead, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-9887).