Large-Scale Digital Humanities Scholarship: Some Initial Experiments
Abstract
For years digital humanists have asked, in Greg Crane's memorable phrase, "What would you do with a million books?" Now we finally have computational access to million-book collections, as well as large-scale corpora of many other kinds: manuscripts, articles, maps, images, court cases. In this talk, Dan Cohen will show some early results of several NEH- and Google-funded projects that explore how best to mine these collections: a study of the intellectual history of the Victorian age through 1.7 million books; an exploration of the history of crime in London through 200,000 legal records; and a broader study of how historians without technical skills might use these digital resources and tools. The results are both simpler and more complex than once imagined; most of all, they point to a research agenda for the next decade that should prove engrossing for both humanists and computer scientists alike.
Bio
Daniel J. Cohen is an Associate Professor of History and the Director
of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason
University. He is the author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics
and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins) and The Ivory Tower and the Open
Web (University of Michigan, forthcoming), coauthor with Roy
Rosenzweig of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and
Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania), and has
published articles on the history of mathematics and religion, the
teaching of history, and the future of history in a digital age in
journals such as the Journal of American History, The Chronicle of
Higher Education, and Rethinking History. He is an inaugural recipient
of the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation
Fellowship. At CHNM he has directed projects ranging from digital
collections (September 11 Digital Archive) to scholarly software
(Zotero). He received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton, his
master’s from Harvard, and his doctorate from Yale. He blogs at
http://dancohen.org, tweets @dancohen, and podcasts at
http://digitalcampus.tv.