Topic Modeling as an Archaeological Dig

I actually suspect that the topics identified by [latent Dirichlet allocation] probably always have the character of “discourses.” —Ted Underwood, “What kinds of ‘topics’ does topic modeling actually produce?” The tools that enable historians to carry out this work of analysis are partly inherited and partly of their own making […]. These tools have enabled Read More…

Some Thoughts on the Politics of Coding

A problem: some preliminary remarks I’ve been thinking tonight about Joris van Zundert’s post in Humanist 28.1, in which he asks whether (and how much) humanities-oriented academia values the work of software builders. Van Zundert’s post responds to a previous question by list moderator Willard McCarty about how the increasing availability of build-it-yourself coding frameworks Read More…