On November 14-16, 2009 I attended the 4th Annual Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. This posting outlines my experiences there, but in a phrase, I found the event to be very stimulating. In my opinion, libraries ought to be embracing the techniques described here and integrating them into their collections and services.

IIT	Paul Galvin Library

Day #0 – A pre-conference workshop

Upon arrival I made my way directly to a pre-conference workshop entitled “Machine Learning, Sequence Alignment, and Topic Modeling at ARTFUL” presented by Mark Olsen and Clovis Gladstone. In the workshop they described at least two applications they were using to discover common phrases between texts. The first was called Philomine and the second was called Text::Pair. Both work similarly but Philomine needs to be integrated with Philologic, and Text::Pair is a stand-alone Perl module. Using these tools n-grams are extracted from texts, indexed to the file system, and await searching. By entering phrases into a local search engine, hits are returned that include the phrases and the works where the phrase was found. I believe Text::Pair could be successfully integrated in my Alex Catalogue.

orange, green, and gray

orange and green

Day #1

The Colloquium formally began the next day with an introduction by Russell Betts (Illinois Institute of Chicago). His most notable quote was, “We have infinite computer power at our fingertips, and without much thought you can create an infinite amount of nonsense.” Too true.

Marco Büchler (University of Leipzig) demonstrated textual reuse techniques in a presentation called “Citation Detection and Textual Reuse on Ancient Greek Texts”. More specifically, he used textual reuse to highlight differences between texts, graph ancient history, and explore computer science algorithms. Try www.eaqua.net for more.

Patrick Juola‘s (Duquesne University) “conjecturator” was the heart of the next presentation called “Mapping Genre Spaces via Random Conjectures”. In short, Juola generated thousands and thousands of “facts” in the form of [subject1] uses [subject2] more or less than [subject3]. He then tested each of these facts for truth against a corpus. Ironically, he was doing much of what Betts alluded to in the introduction — creating nonsense. On the other hand, the approach was innovative.

By exploiting a parts-of-speech (POS) parser, Devin Griffiths (Rutgers University) sought the use of analogies as described in “On the Origin of Theories: The Semantic Analysis of Analogy in Scientific Corpus”. Assuming that an analogy can be defined as a noun-verb-noun-conjunction-noun-verb-noun phrase, Griffith looked for analogies in Darwin’s Origin of Species, graphed the number of analogies against locations in the text, and made conclusions accordingly. He asserted that the use of analogy was very important during the Victorian Age, and he tried to demonstrate this assertion through a digital humanities approach.

The use of LSIDs (large screen information displays) was discussed by Geoffrey Rockwell (McMaster University). While I did not take a whole lot of notes from this presentation, I did get a couple of ideas: 1) figure out a way for a person to “step into” a book, or 2) display a graphic representation of a text on a planetarium ceiling. Hmm…

Kurt Fendt (MIT) described a number of ways timelines could be used in the humanities in his presentation called “New Insights: Dynamic Timelines in Digital Humanities”. Through the process I became aware of the SIMILE timeline application/widget. Very nice.

I learned of the existence of a number of digital humanities grants as described by Michael Hall (NEH). They are both start-up grants as well a grants on advanced topics. See: neh.gov/odh/.

The first keynote speech, “Humanities as Information Sciences”, was given by Vasant Honavar (Iowa State University) in the afternoon. Honavar began with a brief history of thinking and philosophy, which he believes lead to computer science. “The heart of information processing is taking one string and transforming it into another.” (Again, think the introductory remarks.) He advocated the creation of symbols, feeding them into a processor, and coming up with solutions out the other end. Language, he posited, is an information-rich artifact and therefore something that can be analyzed with computing techniques. I liked how he compared science with the humanities. Science observes physical objects, and the humanities observe human creations. Honavar was a bit arscient, and therefore someone to be admired.

subway tunnel

skyscraper predecessor

Day #2

In “Computational Phonostylistics: Computing the Sounds of Poetry” Marc Plamondon (Nipissing University) described how he was counting phonemes in both Tennyson’s and Browning’s poetry to validate whether or not Tennyson’s poetry is “musical” or plosive sounding and Browning’s poetry is “harsh” or fricative. To do this he assumed one set of characters are soft and another set are hard. He then counted the number of times each of these sets of characters existed in each of the respective poets’ works. The result was a graph illustrating the “musical” or “harshness” of the poetry. One of the more interesting quotes from Plamondon’s presentation included, “I am interested in quantifying aesthetics.”

In C.W. Forstal‘s (SUNY Buffalo) presentation “Features from Frequency: Authorship and Stylistic Analysis Using Repetitive Sound” we learned how he too is counting sound n-grams to denote style. He applied the technique to D.H. Lawrence as well as to the Iliad and Odyssey, and to his mind the technique works to his satisfaction.

The second keynote presentation was give by Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Research) via teleconference. It was called “What Can Be Made Computable in the Humanities?” He began by describing Mathematica as a tool he used to explore the world around him. All of this assumes that the world consists of patterns, and these patterns can be described through the use of numbers. He elaborated through something he called the Principle of Computational Equivalency — once you get to a certain threshold systems create a level of complexity. Such a principle puts pressure on having the simplest descriptive model as possible. (Such things are standard scientific/philosophic principles. Nothing new here.) Looking for patterns was the name of his game, and one such game was applied to music. Discover the patterns in a type of music. Feed the patterns to a computer. Have the computer generate the music. Most of the time the output works pretty well. He called this WolframTones. He went on to describe WolframAlpha as an attempt to make the world’s knowledge computable. Essentially a front-end to Mathematica, WolframAlpha is a vast collection of content associated with numbers: people and their birth dates, the agriculture output of countries, the price of gold over time, temperatures from across the world, etc. Queries are accepted into the system. Searches are done against its content. Results are returned in the form of best-guess answers complete with graphs and charts. WolframAlpha exposes mathematical processing to the general public in ways that have not been done previously. Wolfram described two particular challenges in the creation of WolframAlpha. One was the collection of content. Unlike Google, Wolfram Research does not necessarily crawl the Internet. Rather it selectively collects the content of a “reference library” and integrates it into the system. Second, and more challenging, has been the design of the user interface. People do not enter structured queries, but structured output is expected. Interpreting people’s input is a difficult task in and of itself. From my point of view, he is probably learning more about human thought processes than the natural world.

red girder sculpture

gray sculpture

Some thoughts

This meeting was worth every single penny, especially considering the fact that there was absolutely no registration fee. Free, except of the my travel costs, hotel, and the price of the banquet. Unbelievable!

Just as importantly, the presentations given at this meeting demonstrate the maturity of the digital humanities. These things are not just toys but practical tools for evaluating (mostly) texts. Given the increasing amount of full text available in library collections, I see very little reason why these sorts of digital humanities applications could not be incorporate into library collections and services. Collect full text content. Index it. Provide access to the index. Get back a set of search results. Select one or more items. Read them. Select one or more items again, and then select an option such as graph analogies, graph phonemes, or list common phrases between texts. People need to do more than read the texts. People need to use the texts, to analyze them, to compare & contrast them with other texts. The tools described in this conference demonstrate that such things are more than possible. All that has to be done is to integrate them into our current (library) systems.

So many opportunities. So little time.