The field of digital humanities is unique because scholars attempt to use computational methods to shed light on research questions. Using digital tools and approaches to critically analyze data is relatively new in humanities studies. What sets the digital humanities …
Category: Academic
Data for Religious Studies and Digital Humanities
For the digital humanities and the study of religion, data is never neutral. Data’s un-neutral-ness can be extended to other fields, but especially within disciplines concerned with identity formation and knowledge production, it can never be neutral. Data tend to …
Graphing Some More Data and Bringing It All Together
Returning to the topic of Reagan’s 1980 presidential win, this week I practiced creating additional graphs and connecting them into a “story” with Tableau. Stories allow viewers to see visualizations and other elements, such as textual explanations and images, in …
Graphing Data for Alabama Counties
For this lab assignment, I used Tableau to clean some data referenced in my Finding Data post and to create graphs from these data. I visualized two data sets: Median Household Incomes (1979–1989) of Alabama Counties and Individual Contributions to …
Creating Data from the 1885 Seventh-day Adventist Yearbook
For this exercise in my Digital Humanities class, we practiced creating and organizing data taken from the 1885 Seventh-day Adventist Yearbook (PDF). While we each focused on only a small sample of the data contained in the yearbook, we thought …
Assessing Data for the 1984 Reagan-Bush Election
For this post I am assessing the data concerning Alabamian contributions to the 1984 Reagan campaign as provided by the Federal Electoral Commission. I downloaded the csv file provided by the Commission and uploaded the dataset to Tableau to assist …
What Difference Does the Interface Make?
The interface of any digital project is never self-evident. It is reflective of assumptions made about the intended purpose of the project for intended audiences. And purpose and audience are interconnected. While I will discuss how the design of an …
Finding Data: Church Membership and the Rise of Religious Conservatism
For my final project in my Digital Humanities class, I am interested in investigating the relationships between church membership numbers (1980, 1990) and presidential election results (1980, 1984, 1988, 1992) in Alabama at the county level. Depending on the evident …
Tidy Data
Hadley Wickham’s “tidy data” approach makes it easier for data to be manipulated in spreadsheets. The three criteria for tidy data are as follows: There is one variable per column. Each observation gets a row. Each observation type gets a …
What is “Digital Humanities”?
The answer depends on whom you ask, but generally speaking, the digital humanities bridge the gap between traditional humanities scholarship and digital technology. Digital humanities value accessible and inclusive scholarship, collaboration among disciplines and the public, and iterative and experimental …
