Let’s get in formation

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View from the Uni cafeteria. Not bad, one might say.

And so it’s a wrap on day 4 of Digital Humanities Hackathon 2019. After Friday’s presentation, in which we introduced our preliminary research plan and the research question itself, it was clear that we needed to do some serious reformulating. Today we have continued to work hard on finetuning the research question and the actual research.

As was mentioned on Friday’s post, the Genre and Style group decided to go on a new path with regards to our focus and the way of going about it. Our research stems from a (newly-found) interest in exploring firstly, what named entities can be found in 18th century publications, and secondly, whether genre-classification of these texts can be done on the basis of possible patterns that clusters of named entities comprise. At the moment, the named entities we are placing our primary focus on are proper nouns referring to people. However, further elaborations and updates on this can be expected on the blog as the group’s work proceeds.

 

The group members doing their thing.

In addition to this, the day consisted mainly of independent work; the computer scientists among us were busy with, for example, compiling sample sets of the data retrieved from ECCO so that the applicability and accuracy of the named entity recognition (NER) algorithm can be examined. Further elaboration of that can maybe be expected in tomorrow’s post. While waiting to get our hands on the quantitative results in the making, others conducted various preparational work, such as literature review on articles discussing genres in early modern English texts as well as NER and text mining. Feels good to have this show on the road!

The day shall end with popcorn and a group viewing of the season finale of Game of Thrones in the ComHis group’s office. So as you can understand, I gotta go now.

This post is written by Annika Pensola, a first year student in the Mas­ter’s Pro­gramme in Eng­lish Stud­ies, Faculty of Arts in the University of Helsinki. Currently feeling inspired by the international and multidisciplinary composition of the hackathon and excited for its results.