CarolineWinter
commented
7 years ago Proposal Introductions: Who are we and what we hope you get from this talk (5 min)
- Eleanor: Worked in Silicon Valley tech startups since 2008, self- and bootcamp-taught developer, now a product manager who builds things on the side and reviews/writes code at work
- Caroline: PhD student and sessional instructor at the University of Victoria, studies Gothic economics
- Both are children of Lit professors who love computers
- Takeaways: What the digital humanities are and how programming is facilitating some exciting changes to how we approach the humanities; how we approached a simple project using Python and what challenges we encountered.
Digital Humanities: A primer (5 minutes)
- What is it? CAROLINE
- What problems is Problems computing uniquely able to solve? CAROLINE
- What are some examples of Digital Humanities projects?
- YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture ELEANOR
- Linked Modernisms CAROLINE?
- WordHoard CAROLINE?
Project Demo: Gothic Colors (15 minutes)
- Goal: Exploring the use of color words in Romantic Gothic literature as a way to interpret the mood and atmosphere of the novel and compare it to others
- Process: Scoping the project
- Why: Understanding what kind of color palette a Gothic novel uses is important for identifying themes within the novel. (If we're analyzing the novel Frankenstein, for example, lots of red would be expected, given its association with blood, but if we find a lot of green, which tends to be associated with nature, we might start to understand the novel in a different way. A more innovative use of this analysis would be to compare our data with the palette used by Romantic painters, since Gothic literature is closely linked with the visual arts. Understanding what the Gothic world "looked like" in terms of color is also important for defining the Gothic aesthetic, a definition that's missing, surprisingly, from Gothic literary scholarship.)
- Period covered
- Sample works
- Desired outputs
- Challenges: Why “counting color words” isn’t as easy as it sounds
- Decoding context: Descriptive words vs color names (violets, oranges)
- Changes in language over time: usage of color words then vs. now
- Tools: Data structures and libraries used
- csv reader to Beautiful Soup for ingesting texts
- Natural language processing: Pros and cons of using it versus creating our own rules for interpretation and edge cases
- Review of the finished product: Demo and select code snippets
Wrap up and questions (5 minutes)
Create a file with the presentation, include skeleton and Digital Humanities data. Upload to GH or Google Drive.