Digital Cultural Mapping: Transformative Scholarship and Teaching in the Geospatial Humanities

"Digital Cultural Mapping: Transformative Scholarship in the Geospatial Humanities" is a proposal for a three-week summer institute at UCLA for an interdisciplinary group of 12 humanities scholars and advanced graduate students to learn how to develop innovative publications and courses that harness the theoretical and practical approaches of the "geospatial humanities." Situated at the intersection of critical cartography and information visualization, the Institute will combine a survey of the state of the art in interoperable geospatial tools and publication models, with hands-on, studio-based training in how to integrate GIS data into humanities scholarship, develop robust spatial visualizations, and deploy a suite of mapping tools in the service of creating publication- ready research articles and short monographs. The Institute will culminate in an "impact and evaluation" seminar of these publications with representatives from major university presses and journals

Multi-scale Hybridized Topic Modeling: A Pipeline for Analyzing Unstructured Text Datasets via Topic Modeling

We propose a multi-scale hybridized topic modeling method to find hidden topics from transcribed interviews more accurately and efficiently than traditional topic modeling methods. Our multi-scale hybridized topic modeling method (MSHTM) approaches data at different scales and performs topic modeling in a hierarchical way utilizing first a classical method, Nonnegative Matrix Factorization, and then a transformer-based method, BERTopic. It harnesses the strengths of both NMF and BERTopic. Our method can help researchers and the public better extract and interpret the interview information. Additionally, it provides insights for new indexing systems based on the topic level. We then deploy our method on real-world interview transcripts and find promising results

Multi-scale Hybridized Topic Modeling: A Pipeline for Analyzing Unstructured Text Datasets via Topic Modeling

We propose a multi-scale hybridized topic modeling method to find hidden topics from transcribed interviews more accurately and efficiently than traditional topic modeling methods. Our multi-scale hybridized topic modeling method (MSHTM) approaches data at different scales and performs topic modeling in a hierarchical way utilizing first a classical method, Nonnegative Matrix Factorization, and then a transformer-based method, BERTopic. It harnesses the strengths of both NMF and BERTopic. Our method can help researchers and the public better extract and interpret the interview information. Additionally, it provides insights for new indexing systems based on the topic level. We then deploy our method on real-world interview transcripts and find promising results

Understanding Digital Humanities

2012 In the first decade of the 21 st century, the researchers in the humanities and humanistic social sciences have gradually started to adopt computational and visualization tools. The majority of this work often referred as "digital humanities" has focused on textual data (e.g., literature, historical records, or social media) and spatial data (e.g., locations of people, places, or events visualization and computational analysis of large collections of images and video suitable for researchers in media studies, the humanities, and the social sciences who do not have technical background, and to apply these techniques to progressively large media data sets. Our second goal was theoretical -to examine existing practices and assumptions of visualization and computational data analysis (thus the name "Software Studies"), and articulate new research questions enabled by humanistic computational work with "big cultural data" in general, and visual media specifically. 3 This chapter draws on the number of my articles written since we started the lab where I discuss history of visualization, the techniques that we developed for visualizing large sets of visual media, and their applications to various types of media. 4 The reader is advised to consult these 1 For recent discussions of digital humanities, see David M

Snapshots of a Discipline in Transition

Laura Mandell interviews Todd Presner, creator of the Hypercities project, about digital humanities, disciplinarity, and visualization, including the essays in this special issue.Full Sound: HTML(pdf for download -- right click or control click to save

Hypercities Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities

Hypercities are always under construction. Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano put digital humanities theory into practice to chart the proliferating cultural records of places around the world

Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is a contributing author, Deconstructivism and the Holocaust: On the Origins and Legacy of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Book Description: Depictions of the Holocaust in history, literature, and film became a focus of intense academic debate in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, with the passing of the eyewitness generation and the rise of comparative genocide studies, the Holocaust’s privileged place not only in scholarly discourse but across Western society has been called into question. Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture is a searching reappraisal of the debates and controversies that have shaped Holocaust studies over a quarter century. This landmark volume brings international scholars of the founding generation of Holocaust studies into conversation with a new generation of historians, artists, and writers who have challenged the limits of representation through their scholarly and cultural practices. Focusing on the public memorial cultures, testimonial narratives, and artifacts of cultural memory and history generated by Holocaust remembrance, the volume examines how Holocaust culture has become institutionalized, globalized, and variously contested. Organized around three interlocking themes—the stakes of narrative, the remediation of the archive, and the politics of exceptionality—the essays in this volume explore the complex ethics surrounding the discourses, artifacts, and institutions of Holocaust remembrance. From contrasting viewpoints and, in particular, from the multiple perspectives of genocide studies, the authors question if and why the Holocaust should remain the ultimate test case for ethics and a unique reference point for how we understand genocide and crimes against humanity.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/history-books/1059/thumbnail.jp