Digital Humanities

What Are Vowels Made Of? Graphing a Classic Dataset with R

February 13, 2024
Anna Björklund
by Anna Björklund. Vowels are all around us. Mainstream US English has around twelve unique vowels. How can our brains tell these sounds apart? This blog post will help you answer this question by plotting vowel data from a classic American English dataset by Peterson and Barney (1952).

Addison Pickrell

IUSE Undergraduate Advisory Board
Mathematics
Sociology

Addison is an aspiring mathematician and social scientist (Class of '27). He loves collecting books he'll never read, is an open-source and open-access advocate, and an aspiring community organizer and systems disrupter. Ask me about community-based participatory action research (CBPAR), critical pedagogy, applied mathematics, and social science.

MaxQDA Fundamentals

February 6, 2024, 1:00pm
This two-hour introductory workshop will teach you MaxQDA from scratch with clear introductions, concise examples, and support documents. You will learn how to download and install the MaxQDA software, upload multiple forms of data then how to use manual and autocode features. We will review some of the additional analytic features including visual, memo and the Questions, Themes and Theories (QTT) tools. We will briefly touch on the MaxQDA Team cloud-based version. Instructors will share recommended resources.

Tracking Urban Expansion Through Satellite Imagery

December 12, 2023
Leïla Njee Bugha
by Leïla Njee Bugha. Among its many uses, remote sensing can prove especially useful to document changes and trends from eras or settings, where traditional sources are either inexistent or infrequently collected. This is the case when one wants to study urban expansion in sub-Saharan countries over the past 20 years. To further remedy the lack of data on land cover uses from earlier time periods, classification methods can be used as well. Using easily accessible satellite imagery from Google Earth Engine, I provide here an example combining remote sensing with classification to detect changes in the land cover in Nigeria since 2000 due to urban expansion.

The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same?

December 18, 2023
Tonya Lindsey, Ph.D.
By Tonya D. Lindsey, Ph.D. Think about how often you hear someone gripe about the deterioration of society and then blame the Internet or social media. This blog suggests that the things we are exposed to virtually are not new but instead present us with more and frequent opportunities to reflect on perennial social problems and find solutions even as we better understand ourselves as individuals in a global community.

MaxQDA Fundamentals

January 10, 2024, 9:00am
This two-hour introductory workshop will teach you MaxQDA from scratch with clear introductions, concise examples, and support documents. You will learn how to download and install the MaxQDA software, upload multiple forms of data then how to use manual and autocode features. We will review some of the additional analytic features including visual, memo and the Questions, Themes and Theories (QTT) tools. We will briefly touch on the MaxQDA Team cloud-based version. Instructors will share recommended resources.

Exploratory Data Analysis in Social Science Research

November 14, 2023
Kamya Yadav
by Kamya Yadav. Causal inference has become the dominant endeavor for many political scientists, often at the expense of good research questions and theory building. Returning to descriptive inference – the process of describing the world as it exists – can help formulate research questions worth asking and theory that is grounded in reality. Exploratory data analysis is one method of conducting descriptive inference. It can help social science researchers find empirical patterns and puzzles that motivate their research questions, test correlations between variables, and engage with the existing literature on a topic. In this blog post, I walk through results from exploratory data analysis I conducted for my dissertation project on political ambition of women.

Americanist Linguistics: on Ethics and Intent

October 17, 2023
Anna Bjorklund
by Anna Björklund. In this post, Anna Björklund investigates the origin of the linguistic study of indigenous American languages, its inextricable ties to settler-colonialism, and how linguistics can move forward as a field.

MaxQDA: Introduction

September 28, 2023, 2:00pm
This two-hour introductory workshop will teach you MaxQDA from scratch with clear introductions, concise examples, and support documents. You will learn how to download and install the MaxQDA software, upload multiple forms of data then how to use manual and autocode features. We will review some of the additional analytic features including visual, memo and the Questions, Themes and Theories (QTT) tools. We will briefly touch on the MaxQDA Team cloud-based version. Instructors will share recommended resources.

Why We Need Digital Hermeneutics

July 13, 2023
Tom van Nuenen
by Tom van Nuenen. Tom van Nuenen discusses the sixth iteration of his course named Digital Hermeneutics at Berkeley. The class teaches the practices of data science and text analysis in the context of hermeneutics, the study of interpretation. In the course, students analyze texts from Reddit communities, focusing on how these communities make sense of the world. This task combines both close and distant readings of texts, as students employ computational tools to find broader patterns and themes. The article reflects on the rise of AI language models like ChatGPT, and how these machines interpret human interpretations. The popularity and profitability of language models presents an issue for the future of open research, due to the monetization of social media data.