An Introduction to Humanities Analytics in Three Examples

Explore the foundations of humanities analytics through three illuminating examples in this comprehensive lecture. Delve into the British Archive, the Old Bailey, and diary analysis to understand key concepts like operationalization, signal processing, and topic modeling. Learn how to extract meaningful insights from digital sources, empowering humanities scholars with practical text analysis methods. Discover the applications of probability, natural language processing, and cultural analytics in extracting content and deriving meaning from historical texts. Gain valuable knowledge on measuring predictability in debates and identifying leaders and followers through reflexive diary entries. This lecture, part of a broader course supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, aims to demystify computational text analysis for humanities scholars, enabling new avenues of research and scholarship.