Blog Profile / Electric Archaeology
| URL : | http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Archaeology | |
| Posts on Regator: | 92 | |
| Posts / Week: | 0.9 | |
| Archived Since: | July 9, 2011 | |
Blog Post Archive
Where Roman Roads and Topic Models Intersect
Previously, I ended up with a map of UK districts, coloured by the five groups that Gephi’s modularity routine suggested were present, in the network of districts to districts based on shared patterns in the underlying topics (the topic model generated from the total dump of the Portable Antiquities Scheme database). I asked on twitter … Continue reading ?
github.com/shawngraham
I’ve got a Github account. My first repository may be viewed at https://github.com/shawngraham/historicalfriction. Took a bit of tinkering, but I think I’ve got the idea. Other humanities github type projects can be found via a simple search.
Reading Inscriptions Algorithmically
Inscriptions are complicated beasts. Frequently quite small and incomplete, epigraphers are able to extract an enormous amount of information from inscriptions – especially when they have other inscriptions with which to contrast and compare. Show More Summary
Topic modeling the things that fell out of pockets
Topic modeling is very popular at the moment in the digital humanities. Ian, Scott and I described them as tools for extracting topics or injecting semantic meaning into vocabularies: “Topic models represent a family of computer programs that extract topics from texts. A topic to the computer is a list of words that occur in … Continue reading ?
Graeworks – my tenure and promotion online portfolio
My online tenure & promotion portfolio may be viewed at graeworks.net It is a work in progress, so I would welcome comments and suggestions. I will be applying for t&p this coming autumn. The department is currently in the midst of setting its own discipline specific language for what counts for tenure, and what counts … Continue reading ?
Keynote, Some Assembly Required, now on Youtube
‘Some Assembly Required’, my keynote at the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education is now available on youtube. (If you don’t see me, I’m the second person on the playlist). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K58DOSeQ0N4&feature=share&list=PLL1ugrJCNbcq8v_iIHqh8mCja6YFOuCEe
Topic Modeling an archaeological database: today’s adventures
If you follow me on twitter, and saw a number of bizarre/cryptic tweets today, I was live tweeting my work stream. This is what I did today – think of this as stream of consciousness over the last five hours. imported portable antiquities scheme database into access so I could work with it. queried it, … Continue reading ?
Topic Modeling an Archaeological Database 2
Some things I have learned in recent days: data must be cleaned. Really. It’s probably still too noisy, even when you think it isn’t. Eliminate frequently occuring meta-notes (as it were). All citations to Guest & Wells on Coins in the UK, for instance, really muck things up. you can enter a single csv file … Continue reading ?
Topic Modeling the Portable Antiquities Scheme
I got my hands on the latest build of the Portable Antiquities Scheme database. I want to topic model the items in this database, to look for patterns in the small material culture of Britain, across time and space. The data comes in a single CSV, with approximately 500 000 individual rows. The data’s a … Continue reading ?
Some Assembly Required: teaching through/with/about/by/because of, the Digital Humanities (slides & notes)
I’m giving a keynote address to the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education conference, at Carleton on Thursday (10.30, River Building). I’ve never done a keynote before, so I’ll confess to being a bit nervous. ‘Provoke!’ I’ve been told. Show More Summary
Historical Friction
I want to develop an app that makes it difficult to move through the historically ‘thick’ places – think Zombie Run, but with a lot of noise when you are in a place that is historically dense with information. I want to ‘visualize’ history, but not bother with the usual ‘augmented reality’ malarky where we … Continue reading ?
Data Mining an Archaeological Database
In July, I’m presenting work related to data mining an archaeological database, in this case, the Portable Antiquity Scheme. I wondered, if I treated each district in the UK as a ‘document’, and the items recovered in its territory as the words, would I see any interesting or useful patterns if I ran some topic … Continue reading ?
Reanimating Networks with Agent Modeling
I’m presenting next week at the Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting. I’m giving two papers. One argues for parsimonious models when we do agent based modeling. The other reverses the flow of archaeological network analysis and instead of finding nets in the archaeology, I use agent based models to generate networks that help me … Continue reading ?
Simulation as Deformation, or, the Role of Agent Based Modeling in Historical Archaeology
I’ll be at the Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting next week, presenting in a session on ‘modeling dynamics in coupled social-natural systems’, and in another on network methods for archaeology. For me, these two approaches are hard to tease apart. Below you’ll find my draft for the modeling session. Simulation as deformation from DoctorG … Continue reading ?
Hodder’s ‘Tanglegram’ as Network
I am reading Ian Hodder’s book, ‘Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationship between Humans and Things’ Hodder writes that the tanglegram cannot be represented as a network, since a network doesn’t consider the nature of the relationships or nodes. This is not in fact the case. Representing these complex relationships as a network is quite … Continue reading ?
Practical Necromancy talk @Scholarslab – part I
Below is a draft of the first part of my talk for Scholarslab this week, at the University of Virginia. It needs to be whittled down, but I thought that those of you who can’t drop by on Thursday might enjoy this sneak peak. Thursday, March 21 at 2:00pm in Scholars’ Lab, 4th floor Alderman … Continue reading ?
Introducing Voyant in a History Tutorial
This week my HIST2809 students are encountering digital history, as part of their ‘Historian’s Craft’ class (an introduction to various tools & methods). As part of the upcoming assignment, I’m having them run some history websites through Voyant, as a way of sussing out how these websites craft a particular historical consciousness. Each week, there’s … Continue reading ?
Thinking out loud: language re tenure guidelines for the Digital Historian
At my university, we’ve been asked to consider discipline-specific language for new tenure & promotion guidelines. I’ve been writing a response to our chair, and I thought, in keeping with how I regard this problem, it would be a good idea to share these thoughts. Onwards. The 1.4 edition of the Journal of Digital Humanities … Continue reading ?
Living the Life Electric
I’m addressing the Underhill Graduate Students’ Colloquium tomorrow, here in the history department at Carleton U. Below are my slides for ‘Living the Life Electric: On Becoming a Digital Humanist’
Text Analysis of 2012 Digital Humanities Job Adverts part 3
Here is a zoomable pdf of the same image, for clarity In this case, the two mode network of jobs to top consituent topics provides much more clarity than the graph I posted at the end of part 2, the one-mode jobs-to-jobs via shared topics. I used the java gui for MALLET, which arranges the … Continue reading ?