Category Archives: Digital Humanities

OED Subject Matter

In my last post I described using HathiTrust’s Solr Proxy API to fetch Hathi genre metadata for OED quotations. But genre is not the only metadata that Hathi sends back down the intertubes when I ask it a question. For most works, I also get a Library of Congress Classification code for the volume. This […]

06.02.2017 – 17:20 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Hathi Genre Again – Zero Recall

In “Hathi’s Automatic Genre Classifier” [17.01.06] I compared the consolidated automatic genre metadata for a subset of HathiTrust Digital Library texts (available here) to the genre classifications arrived at for human-inspected works as part of the OED quotation tagging project under-way at The Life of Words. My process there was pretty closely supervised, but the […]

06.02.2017 – 17:00 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (5)

Guest Post: Magazines and the Dentist Test

Cosmin Dzsurdzsa is a research assistant working on identifying the textual genre of quotations in the OED. Here he writes the first in a series of posts on borderline and difficult genre determinations. Filtering quotation blocks is essential to optimizing our results with the quantity of data we deal with here at LOW. For a […]

03.02.2017 – 15:03 | By VCD | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

Hathi’s Automatic Genre Classifier

The HathiTrust Digital Library is a massive collection of digital books: As of 2017, it contains 5 billion pages from 15 million volumes (7 million titles). About 40% of these are public-domain works, meaning anyone can search and read them. Some of these have been marked for their textual genre. Here I do a little […]

06.01.2017 – 13:40 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

OED Gender Genre

In “Sex in the OED” I  ran through some figures on female vs male representation in OED quotation evidence, comparing the original OED1 with the later Supplements that resulted in OED2. Here I look a little closer at what kinds of works by women the two editions tended to cite. Below are two charts breaking […]

08.12.2016 – 10:05 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Burchfield’s Reach-Backs

The vast majority of the quotation evidence in Robert Burchfield’s OED Supplements comes from after the first (1928) edition was completed. The median date for these is 1944, whereas for the first edition it’s 1742. However, in some circumstances the Supplements did reach back into periods already covered by OED1 — if it could antedate […]

06.12.2016 – 10:59 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Sex in the OED

Two subprojects concerning OED quotation metadata are now near enough to complete to present some preliminary results. They concern the sex of the authors quoted in the OED, in both the first edition (1928) and the later Supplements (1933, 1972-86). The most focused work on this question so far has been Baigent, Brewer, and Larminie, […]

02.12.2016 – 17:21 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Guest Post: Strong and Weak Genre Classification

Over the summer we’re featuring guest posts by Research Assistants at The Life of Words. Here Cosmin Dzsurdzsa – a 2nd year undergraduate in English at UW – thinks about moving from human intuition to computer rule-making in textual-genre classification: When trying to automate text classification algorithmically, one has to pay close attention to how […]

07.07.2016 – 09:17 | By VCD | Posted in Digital Humanities, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

How did OED Supplements Supplement?

There has always been an interest in the changing editorial practice within and between various editions of the Oxford English Dictionary. Recently some scholars have complained that changing electronic interfaces are making it impossible to distinguish what edition a particular definition or quotation is coming from. See, e.g., Charlotte Brewer, “OED Online Re-launched: Distinguishing old […]

04.04.2016 – 09:58 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Vector Space and Poetic Logic

I’ve been spending the weekend experimenting with vector space modelling and poetic language. Vector space word embedding models use learning algorithms on very large corpora in order map a unique location in n-dimensional space to each token (=word) in the corpus. “N-dimensional space” is just a mathy-sounding way of saying that multiple (or n) features […]

14.03.2016 – 10:40 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)