This xkcd comic from Monday has been forwarded around a bit. My own reaction was heavily influenced by @sepoy’s comment that maybe JFK was talking about the “global south (po folk)” avant la lettre. I think it’s funny that JFK could have merged the idea of the “Global South” with the literal southern hemisphere. Randall [...]
[A lot of the below is meandering toward what I suspect is a rather obvious conclusion to hardened veterans of the digital humanities. Since I'm not one of those, my own shoes needed to walk the mile. Of what transpires below, what might be new is, quickly, how while there is a call for digital [...]
Continue reading about Image vs. Text (also quant. vs. qual.)
Should a foreign language requirement for a literary studies PhD be fulfillable by a machine language? Or maybe even by a methods course (like a course in statistics, GIS, or some other competence in computational technology)? These questions have been on my mind since I flew back Sunday morning from an energizing time at lovely [...]
Continue reading about Learning a language: human vs. machine
Everyone in the US knows that the more removed an election is from a presidential election, with emergency special elections inhabiting the limit point away, the more turnout will be depressed. Furthermore, everyone in the US knows, since the Christian Coalition rode this pony into power, that the lower turnout is, the fewer votes you [...]
[I'm not entirely sure why I'm turning this into a post. It's essentially my final project for my Advanced GIS class. I think it's rather provocative, however, and it shows a few immediate possible further directions for analysis.] In my earlier geospatial analysis of the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos, I decided that I [...]
Continue reading about Nearest Neighbors and Monte Carlo Simulations with Dos Passos
In the first part of this post, I described how a lot of ways in which work in the humanities is interacting with the spatial is in the process of generating “flat maps.” That is, they reproduce what is already in the texts themselves, without pushing any analytical balls forward. These sorts of projects engage [...]
(although, actually, all the talk about using a GIS is in the second part!) I often feel like I’m a few drinks behind the rest of the crowd when it comes to drinking the digital humanities Kool-Aid. This is kind of a problem, because a chunk of what I’m trying to do with my dissertation [...]
(This is how I spent GIS Day) I was surprised in my previous post by how young and black Louisiana was (in 2000), yet how not for Obama it went. Only 10 of 64 parishes were carried by the Democrat, though they included three of the four most populous parishes. I wondered if maybe there [...]
[I massively updated the middle part of this post after thinking about it on the ride home] I was pretty startled by the two maps I saw at Strange Maps over the weekend. They showed a distinct correlation between cotton production in 1860 and Obama support in 2008. Where more cotton was picked 150 years [...]
