Stories: Interesting projects I worked on this past year
Posted on August 9, 2017 in Uncategorized by Eric Lease Morgan
This is short list of “stories” outlining some of the more interesting projects I worked on this past year:
- Ask Putin – A faculty member from the College of Arts & Letters acquired the 950-page Cyrillic transcript of a television show called “Ask Putin”. The faculty member had marked up the transcription by hand in order to analyze the themes conveyed therein. They then visited the Center for Digital Scholarship, and we implemented a database version of the corpus. By counting & tabulating the roots of each of the words for each of the sixteen years of the show, we were able to quickly & easily confirm many of the observations she had generated by hand. Moreover, the faculty member was able to explore additional themes which they had not previously coded.
- Who’s related to whom – A visiting scholar from the Kroc Center asked the Center for Digital Scholarship to extract all of the “named entities” (names, places, & things) from a set of Spanish language newspaper articles. Based on strength of the relationships between the entities, the scholar wanted a visualization to be created illustrating who was related to whom in the corpus. When we asked more about the articles and their content, we learned we had been asked to map the Columbian drug cartel. While incomplete, the framework of this effort will possibly be used by a South American government.
- Counting 250,000,000 words – Working with Northwestern University, and Washington University in St. Louis, the Center for Digital Scholarship is improving access & services against the set of literature called “Early English Books”. This corpus spans 1460 and 1699 and is very representative of English literature of that time. We have been creating more accurate transcriptions of the texts, digitizing original items, and implementing ways to do “scalable reading” against the whole. After all, it is difficult to read 60,000 books. Through this process each & every word from the transcriptions has been saved in a database for future analysis. To date the database includes a quarter of a billion (250,000,000) rows. See: http://cds.crc.nd.edu
- Convocate – In conjunction with the Center for Civil and Human Rights, the Hesburgh Libraries created an online tool for comparing & contrasting human rights policy written by the Vatican and various non-governmental agencies. As a part of this project, the Center for Digital Scholarship wrote an application that read each & every paragraph from the thousands of pages of text. The application then classified each & every paragraph with one or more keyword terms for the purposes of more accurate & thorough discovery across the corpus. The results of this application enable the researcher to items of similar interest even if they employ sets of dispersed terminology. For more detail, see: https://convocate.nd.edu
