Blogs World
by Hubert Guillaud
technology is changing our understanding of the humanities and social sciences (SHS), as it has changed our understanding of science, there is little explained Patricia Cohen for the New York Times . Of course, given this goal, digital media are a means than an end, says historian Anthony Grafton conscientiously. But for Brett Bobley, director of the office digital humanities the National Endowment of the Humanities American ( National Endowment for the Humanities , NEH), analysis of unprecedented amounts of data can reveal new patterns and trends and raise unexpected issues for the study.
"Technology has not only made astronomy, biology and physics more effectively. But it has allowed researchers to do research they could not do before ". And this is especially the case in the field SHS, where access to great documentary corpus in electronic form may bring new knowledge. In any case, that aims to show the support of Google or Digging into data, a grant program to help research in the humanities to move in new directions, propelled by Brett Bobley office at NEH.
The digital humanities to understand the world
As so often in the field of Digital Humanities (Humanities Digital ), for non-specialists, it is results that are the most interesting. One of the projects have benefited from this program is that of Dan Edelstein, a professor of French and Italian at Stanford University who conducted map the flow of ideas during the Enlightenment , studying with Using the computer, the correspondence of the great thinkers of the time (Locke, Newton, Voltaire, Swift, Rousseau, Bentham ...). Interactive mapping implementation better measure the relationship network of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century and shows that it has very different structures according thinkers ( video ). Mapping has shown, for example, the scarcity of exchanges between Paris and London, while historians believed that the French thinkers were inspired by British thinkers: in fact, the thinkers of the Continent seem to have little exchange with the British Isles.
Image: mapping exchanges of correspondence from the Republic of Letters in the Age of Enlightenment for some of the most important thinkers of the time.
American universities seem to be actively digital tools. The University of Virginia has developed for its students a web interface, called Visual Eyes , to easily build dynamic and interactive visualizations.
Digital Mappaemundi project is a study of medieval maps and geographical texts, allowing researchers to annotate their cards simultaneously and share their notes with others, says Martin Foys K medievalist at the University Drew in New Jersey. "The digital map has the potential to transform the medieval studies" , said the enthusiastic researcher, particularly because they are communal, that is to say, shared by a network of experts whose contributions contribute to the quality of the project. "The ease with which a community may have to work through these tools is something that fundamentally changes the way we do our work" . Except that sharing culture is not necessarily placed between specialists, and often all functions are far from being used by researchers, who are more in competition with each other on their research.
The phenomenon of digital humanities is still new and practitioners are still often surprised by what develops. When the complete works of Abraham Lincoln published have been online a few years ago, the director of Cahiers Abraham Lincoln, Daniel W. Stowell, expected that historians are more attentive to his project. But he was surprised to discover that the most frequent users were people connecting from the University Press, Oxford: the Oxford dictionary editors had gone to hunt in the archives Lincoln first occurrences of certain words.
"People will use this data in ways that we can not even imagine" enthuses Daniel Stowell, "and I think this is one of the most exciting developments of the humanities currently ". Tom Scheinfeldt, director of the Center for history and new media at George Mason University, the university has entered an era "post-theoretical" . a "methodological moment" similar to that experienced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. "Practical issues of building the discipline of assembling an annotated bibliography, the definition of a research program and the significance of the role of the historian" were then the main work of a large number of scholars. Are we now entering a similar phase? That's what qu'espèrent proponents of digital humanities anyway.
Understanding the evolution of language laws
is in this context that we understand the new tool has unveiled Google Google N-Grams - a name inspired by the work of theorist Claude Shannon and information that evokes n-grams (sequences of consecutive words), apparently widely used Programs by language processing. Google N-Grams is search engine that searches the 5.2 million books scanned by Google and freely accessible to the public, says New York Times , 500 billion words, as it rightly marvel Jean Veronis on his blog, or "4% of books never published on Earth." A tool which allows you to draw curves lexical over several centuries, since the basis of books on which it is constructed consists of books published between 1500 and today, from a body divided into 5 languages .
can thus see that Marilyn Monroe and Mickey Mouse do not receive the same attention as printed books ... Or as Freud has become a more important Galileo, Einstein or Darwin ...
"The goal is to give a child 8 years the ability to browse the cultural mood of the story as recorded in the books " said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a Harvard researcher among authors from MIT, Google, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt signatories section of the journal Science makes the news .
This new tool will require a lot of reflection on the various biases in the way data are collected, "said biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose investigations into the evolution the Polynesian canoe has transformed cultural studies, and notes, for example, the frequency of obscenity can not only be an indicator of cultural trend .
Culturomics, Genomics ... "There was a big hype around the draft human genome causing ... Before we understand that this list n was not very helpful to those who are not specialists " believes Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading. " We now understand that this is not the genes that are important, but how they are expressed in organs.
"I'm not saying that the data are not useful" , he said. "But the database does not" spit "simple answers". Nothing will be easier in fact that to make out a lot of banalities.
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