In preparation for MITH’s NEH-funded Topic Modeling for Humanities Research workshop, which is just over a week away, we’d like to highlight some resources associated with the workshop—as well as some of the recent conversations we’ve been following about applications of topic modeling in the humanities.

First of all, we’d like to encourage everyone to check out Paper Machines, a Zotero extension developed by Jo Guldi and Chris Johnson-Roberson, who will be at the workshop next week to discuss how their project uses topic modeling to provide visualizations of the distribution of topics over time in the contents of your personal Zotero library. We’ve created a Storify post recording just a few of the recent reactions to Paper Machines on Twitter.

There have been a number of interesting conversations on topic modeling in the context of humanities research on Twitter in just the last couple of weeks, including these discussions about how to evaluate and interpret topic models, how to get detailed information about word distributions out of MALLET, and how to use topic models to aid navigation of text collections. Many of the participants in these threads will be at the workshop next week, and we’re looking forward to continuing the conversations there.

We’d also like to point everyone to the public Zotero library created by project director Jennifer Guiliano, which lists papers and blog posts about topic modeling methods and humanities applications; to workshop participant David Mimno‘s comprehensive bibliography; and to the topic modeling Subreddit recently started by Matt Burton (who will also be at the workshop).

I’ve also just put together a Twitter list of all of the participants whose Twitter handles I could round up, and the complete list of speakers and attendees is available on the project website. (If you’re attending the workshop and are on Twitter but not on the list, please let me know).

Please see the project website for a more detailed description of the goals of the workshop and the schedule of presentations and discussions, as well as information about logistics for workshop participants, and be sure to follow #dhtopic on Twitter on Saturday, November 3—one week from tomorrow!