Blog Archives

Podcast 8: Paul Vierthaler on text analysis and stylometry

DH East Asia Podcast
DH East Asia Podcast
Podcast 8: Paul Vierthaler on text analysis and stylometry
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This episode is an interview with Paul Vierthaler on how he has used text mining and analysis with large corpora of pre-modern Chinese literature. Paul discusses how and why he learned how to code – while in the middle of dissertation writing – and how he integrated what he found into a broader quantitative-qualitative project. He then outlines his latest research, which uses sequence alignment and stylometry to analyze and guess the authors of a wide swath of anonymously and pseudonymously authored books written in late imperial China.

Relevant links:
Paul’s website
Leiden Centre for Digital Humanities
Fiction and history: polarity and stylistic gradience in late imperial Chinese literature (article on cultural analytics written by Paul)
Analyzing printing trends in late imperial China using large bibliometric datasets (another article written by Paul)
Ten thousand rooms project
China Biographical Database

Podcast 7: Ruth Mostern on digital mapping and spatial histories

DH East Asia Podcast
DH East Asia Podcast
Podcast 7: Ruth Mostern on digital mapping and spatial histories
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In this episode, Ruth Mostern reflects on graduate training – including her own and various influences – and her earlier projects related to Song dynasty gazetteers. She then discusses her more recent work on large-scale and long-term spatial histories, including the massive Yellow River project (an environmental history spanning 5,000 years of time) and the recently-funded world-historical “gazetteer” project.

Relevant links:
The Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty
Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI)
Perseus Digital Library
UC Merced SpARC
Pelagios Commons
Pitt World History Center

Podcast 6: Tom Mullaney on DH Asia

DH East Asia Podcast
DH East Asia Podcast
Podcast 6: Tom Mullaney on DH Asia
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In this podcast, Tom Mullaney tells us about the DH Asia program at Stanford, including its origins as an idea and its potential future(s), format, and how it encourages anyone interested in or curious about DH to participate. After reflecting on the first round held in spring 2016, he briefly introduces the 2017 cohort (which officially kicked off after this podcast had already been recorded). We also discuss how existing digital infrastructures influence DH in East Asian studies and, briefly, how to maintain a healthy and productive skepticism in DH.

Relevant links:
DH Asia
DH Asia 2017 schedule
Save the Chinese Typewriter project

Podcast 5: DH & Teaching East Asia, with Susan Fernsebner

DH East Asia Podcast
DH East Asia Podcast
Podcast 5: DH & Teaching East Asia, with Susan Fernsebner
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In this episode, the usual hosts welcome Susan Fernsebner for a broader discussion about digital humanities and teaching. We reminisce about what has worked well in the classroom, what needs some tweaking, “experiments” using digital methods, and how teaching itself has changed from all of it. We also talk specifically about what DH can bring to East Asian history classes. We hope you enjoy the discussion as much as we did!

Links mentioned and other relevant links:

Susan Fernsebner’s website and gulou tumblr.
Taiping Civil War – Student site designed in Susan’s introductory History methods course.
“Reworking the Methods Course” – Susan Fernsebner’s blog post on the Taiping Civil War course’s digital project as curriculum.
“Mapping the Taiping Civil War” – blog post by Ryan Brazell about the site (Academic Technology Consultant, University of Richmond).
– Jeffrey McClurken’s Digital Liberal Arts Workshop Links & Resources and his website. McClurken is Professor of History and American Studies & Special Assistant to the Provost for Teaching, Technology, and Innovation at the University of Mary Washington — see his site for Digital Humanities Workshop Links (page listing tools, sample projects, articles and surveys related to curriculum development, collaboration, and more).
University of Mary Washington’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies Blog – Great starting place for innovative conversations on digital pedagogy, online community, tools and resources, and more…
Zach Whalen is a specialist in digital studies at UMW (research in video game history, platform studies, creative coding, and comics). Great work in teaching utilizing both visual and textual projects that intersect with the digital — e.g. twitterbots that utilize text and poetry in new ways, tumblr sites that explore visuality, bringing new insights gained through the digital lens (and slicing things in news ways with the help of code) to everything from House of Leaves (Mark Danielewski) to Top Gun.
– Digital literacy conversation: New Media Consortium’s Strategic Brief on Digital Literacy. See, for background: Bryan Alexander and a valuable critical perspective – “On digital literacies” by Maha Bali and Lee Skallerup-Bessette.

Podcast 4: Javier Cha on network visualization, data sets, and DH in South Korea

DH East Asia Podcast
DH East Asia Podcast
Podcast 4: Javier Cha on network visualization, data sets, and DH in South Korea
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In this episode, we interview Javier Cha on how network visualization has helped him conceptualize his work on marriage networks in pre-modern Korean history. We also discuss more broadly network analysis and visualization tools, data sets as long-term historical sources, and digital humanities projects in South Korea.

Related links

  • Javier’s personal website and video presentation as part of Stanford’s DH Asia initiative
  • Network visualization and analysis tools mentioned in the episode: Cytoscape, GEPHI
  • The new Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities, where Javier now works
  • “Digital / Humanities: New Media and Old Ways in South Korea” – Javier’s article in Asiascape: Digital Asia 2 (2015)
  • Podcast 3: Hilde De Weerdt on MARKUS

    DH East Asia Podcast
    DH East Asia Podcast
    Podcast 3: Hilde De Weerdt on MARKUS
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    In this episode, we interview Hilde De Weerdt, Professor of Chinese History at Leiden University, about MARKUS, an online text markup tool developed as part of the European Research Council funded project “Communication and Empire: Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective.”

    Relevant links:
    current beta version of MARKUS (note: only works in Google Chrome!)
    how to use MARKUS (includes videos with instructions)
    MARKUS conferences and workshops
    The Automating Data Extraction from Chinese Texts Project, which has funded further development of MARKUS.
    Hilde De Weerdt’s book website, which also includes interactive reading platforms and MARKUS files for some of her original research sources.

    Podcast 2: That anti-DH LARB article

    DH East Asia Podcast
    DH East Asia Podcast
    Podcast 2: That anti-DH LARB article
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    **Apologies for a few tiny audio glitches in this episode – we’re still working on perfecting our audio setup.**

    In this podcast we discuss the article published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in May 2016 that criticized the Digital Humanities more broadly, some of the criticisms of it that followed, and relate this to some of our experiences in DH.

    (anti-DH) LARB article – Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities (May 1, 2016)

    LARB DH series – The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Bethany Nowviskie (May 9, 2016)

    Some responses and criticisms that we read related to the anti-DH LARB article:

    Grace Afsari-Mamagani – In Defense of DH

    Jacquelyn Clements – In Support of Digital Humanities

    Schuyler Esprit – tweets in Storify

    Brian Greenspan – The Scandal of Digital Humanities

    Alan Jacobs – Critiquing the Critique of Digital Humanities

    Alan Liu – tweets in Storify

    Alex Reid – De-baits in the Digital Humanities

    Roopika Risam – Digital Humanities in Other Contexts

    Amardeep Singh – In Defense of Digital Tools (by a Non-Tool)

    Tuotilo (PhD student in Germany) – To Be in DH Is To Be Under Attack

    Ted Underwood – Versions of Disciplinary History

    Steward Varner – A few thoughts on the whole DH, neoliberalism, LARB thing

    Podcast 1: Introductions & The Gail Project

    DH East Asia Podcast
    DH East Asia Podcast
    Podcast 1: Introductions & The Gail Project
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    Welcome to the Digital Humanities in East Asian studies podcast. In this inaugural podcast we provide a short introduction to our rationale and the hosts. We then turn to Alan Christy for an introduction to The Gail Project.

    The Gail Project on Twitter:

    The podcast hosts on Twitter:

    We welcome your feedback. You can leave us a message in the comments section below or contact us through social media.