ThatCamp Jersey Shore: Engaging With Massive Humanities Datasets

The final panel of ThatCamp: Jersey Shore was run by Amanda French on engagement with massive humanities datasets. I’ve been tipping my toes into this field a bit recently, so I was eagerly awaiting this panel.

• Franco Moretti’s very important Graphs, Maps, and Trees was discussed. Even with canon expansion, still only 10% of 19th century publications.
• Digital humanities apply millions of pieces of data to Dickens instead of Foucault.
• Moretti article Style Inc. looks at thousands of titles.
• What does these large datasets do to applications like the Oxford English Dictionary? For example, the OED’s proclamation that OMG was first used in 1914.
• Someone (Amanda?) wondered if these large datasets are leading to something like Borges’ Library of Babel.
• Datasets more about questions than theory.

After ThatCamp was over, I headed out for lunch With Amanda, John Theibault, and Deb Gussman. A great end to an excellent conference.

Weekly Reader

Hey, how about some weekend reading!

• Joyce Carol Oates reviews the recent reissue of The Handmaid’s Tale over at The New York Review Of Books.  There is also some lovely discussions of Margaret Atwood’s other books including Surfacing.

• Edwidge Danticat has a new story in a recent issue of The New Yorker.

• Via The Little Professor, Ohio State has digitized some of their out of print books.  I am interested in the texts about Shakespeare and Mildred Newcomb’s The Imagined World Of Charles Dickens because I am reading Oliver Twist this weekend for a class.