Syllabus for an upper-level English seminar at SUNY Cortland | Is Google racist? Is Wikipedia sexist? In this course, we will critically reflect on the digital tools and platforms that mediate so much of our daily lives. More specifically, we will explore how digital technologies can reproduce and challenge conditions of racial, class, and gender…[Read more]

This document describes the steps that are done by the “prep_dataset” script, which harvests and builds the RDF dataset for the Belfast Group Poetry|Networks website, which is used in part as the basis for the network graphs and chord diagrams. Prior to running the script, significant work was required to 1) to tag names in the EAD and TEI and 2)…[Read more]

Computer-aided comparison between large textual corpora, first and foremost in the areas of falsafa, ʿilm kalām, and uṣūl al-fiqh, Muslim & Jewish & Christian.

This paper analyses two closely related but different concepts, digitization and digitalization, first discussed in an encyclopedia article by Brennen and Kreiss in 2016. Digital Humanities mainly uses the first term, whereas business and economics tend to use the second to praise the process of the digitalization of society. But digitalization…[Read more]

While the amount of digitally available data on the worlds’ languages is steadily increasing, with more and more languages being documented, only a small proportion of the language resources produced are sustainable. Data reuse is often difficult due to idiosyncratic formats and a negligence of standards that could help to increase the…[Read more]

Social network analysis is typically used where data are complete and all connections within a system are known. However, as other humanities networking projects have discovered, building a network based on historical data means that we are inevitably working with incomplete information. In other words, the lack of connections in our graph…[Read more]

In creating a project to investigate the relationships among members of the Belfast Group, it is important to know exactly what that Group is. Being specific about this when creating our data was critical so we could accurately measure who was connected to this thing we call “the Belfast Group.” But, as often happens with humanities data, it tur…[Read more]

As we worked on this project and looked at various iterations of the data, we noticed something troubling about some of the women we knew were associated with the Belfast Group: while they sometimes appeared central to the network at other times they were completely invisible. What was happening?

Visualization is often the “way in” to our data, both for scholarly analysis and presentation to an audience. However, it is critical to understand the process of visualizing data: who is it for, and what questions does it answer? In this workshop, participants learn how to choose the right visualization for their data, how to prepare their dat…[Read more]

The American Religious Sounds Project, a joint effort from Michigan State University and Ohio State University, has been gathering sound recordings of American religious life since 2014. The project is undertaking a dual process of expanding to other institutions and ingesting the collection into the Vincent Voice Library at MSU.
With thousands…[Read more]

While the amount of cross-linguistic data is constantly increasing, most datasets produced today and in the past cannot be considered FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible). To remedy this and to increase the comparability of cross-linguistic resources, it is not enough to set up standards and best practices for data to be…[Read more]

By reviewing a recent quantitative study of rhyme patterns in Mandarin Chinese, this study shows how data handling and data analysis in the study of rhyme patterns can be improved. Suggestions for improvement include (a) a consistent annotation of rhyme data, which is exhaustive and facilitates data reuse, and (b) emphasizes the importance of…[Read more]

The author proposes fairy-tale logic as a mode of magical thinking typified by the belief that certain functions, fulfilled correctly and in the right order, lead to predictable outcomes. Mapping similarities in implicit reasoning within “Beauty and the Beast,” the reality television program Beauty and the Geek (2005-08), and the misogynistic nar…[Read more]

Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned to explore differences of interpretation than to describe the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to re-examine the assumption that numbers are only useful for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually…[Read more]

This conference aims to bring together researchers applying network analysis to pre-modern manuscripts and manuscript texts. Key topics include:

• Theoretical reflections on the challenges and advantages of applying network analysis, including social network analysis, to pre-modern written cultures;
• Application of network analysis to cor…[Read more]

Almost nothing can be taken for granted when it comes to the direction of a text—not over the course of the previous five millennia and not in today’s digital world. Texts may mix languages. Languages may mix or change writing systems. Writing systems themselves may use idiosyncratic directional practices, and writers may be rule breakers. Thu…[Read more]

Public health in twenty-first century Ghana is mired with several issues ranging from the inadequacy of
public health facilities, improper settlement planning, insanitary conditions, and the inadequacy of laws
and their implementation. This situation compared to the colonial era is a direct contradiction.
Development in the pre-colonial era to…[Read more]