University of Helsinki
Another day of Hackathoning is nearing its end, and the Genre and Style (tweeting @GenreAndStyle)group is operating at full speed. Our NER (named-entity recognition) approach is providing us with data to analyze as well as a great deal of choices to make. Today we’ve been looking at the names recognised in our subsets of the ECCO data. We are using external databases (mainly DBpedia) to verify names from the list of entities, which includes a rather large variety of strings — it is 18th century text OCR’d from various microfilm copies, after all. The goal for today has been to create preliminary networks to look at, and that was accomplished in the afternoon. Tomorrow we will among other things try to incorporate another subset of data to compare the NER profiles of the datasets.
From the perspective of a DH novice, the week has been wonderful and bewildering. Many aspects of the research we are doing seem enticing, but the time limits and intensity of the hackathon largely deny the possibility to immerse in a technical area one is not acquainted with. However, the discussions and planning sessions (as well as the input of friendly visiting Hackathon researchers) present a wonderful opportunity to bridge together research interests, types of data, and humanities substance on the one hand, and computational and digital methods on the other. Furthermore, the interesting task of visualizing and communicating the crucial message and findings of the project are yet ahead of us (visualization in particular being an aspect of data sciencish research I am personally not well-versed in). The Hackathon is certainly an experience I would recommend to all driven humanists.
Hopefully we will be able to really immerse ourselves with the results of our entity linking efforts before the week reaches its end. Inspecting the content of our object of study, historical texts, in depth and in all its interactions is after all what many of us aim for.
Yours Sincerely,
Gentleman Who Has Made Reading His Diversion Upwards Of Twenty-eight Years
This blog post was written by Aleksi Jalavala, an MA student at the University of Helsinki, who is pushing himself into new territories at the Hackathon as well as in studies in Digital Humanities in general.