Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: As Elijah Meeks and Scott Weingart suggest in their introduction to a special issue of Journal of Digital Humanities, “[t]opic modeling could stand in as a synecdoche of digital humanities” because of its algorithmic complexity and potential obscurity. Joanna Swafford’s two-part topic modeling assignment for undergraduates makes it accessible by giving a clear explanation of the several steps required to prepare textual data, import it into the graphical user interface tool for MALLET, and explore the results. This assignment requires students to try the topic modeling process with different parameters and to assess the results of their experiments. This assignment helps students learn a specific method of text analysis as well as skills in visualizing and interpreting its results in relation to the historical and literary topics of the course
