From archival silence to glorious data
How do you use digital methods to analyze the *gaps* in the archive?
interesting analysis of long 18thC texts in this article, but I'm still concerned abt gender in the corpus: bit.ly/AeZul7- @rogerwhitson take a look at the appendix of sample texts: who among them is a women author? Baillie? who else?
- @rogerwhitson if we're going to do this large scale stuff, we have to ack that not enuf women authors' wrks r digitized
@triproftri You'd think that using methods like this would make it easier to not replicate white male canons.- @rogerwhitson ah, but we haven't funded enuf dig projs for women authors to equal those on male authors
- @rogerwhitson and certainly g-books for 19thc doesn't cover nearly enuf of those so-called "ephemeral" pubs
- @triproftri hrmmm...prob w/ methods of digitization? Perhaps interesting to look at how G digitized the texts.
- @rogerwhitson well g digitized from spec collect libraries; some of those lib have policy *not* to collect ephemeral stuff
- @rogerwhitson yep, unfortunately. but now it's hidden behind all of this glorious data.
- @triproftri Frustrating that new methods like DH repeat some of the mistakes of the past. Makes me think #transformdh has a point.
- @rogerwhitson dh methods r exciting, don't get me wrong. but let's not do "see how everyone writes" query until we get a better balance
- @rogerwhitson bc then all we're doing is asking "how do men write?" funding for the labor behind digitizing & markup isn't innovative
- @triproftri absolutely. This is why Dhers have to be critical of how corpuses are put together. IMO, that's what we can contribute to it.
- @triproftri Wonder if there's a way to use DH methods to uncover the hidden biases in projects like this - or in GoogleBooks, etc.
- @triproftri I just don't know how we would build a corpus. Or what that would look like.
- @rogerwhitson me either. but how abt in dh we start by acknowledging that there's a gender bias? at least in access to 19th c texts
- and there you go. Shades of @spikenlilli 's #dhdebates essay in that spirited convo w/@rogerwhitson
- @triproftri Acknowledging is fine and important, but I'd like to create something that would visualize it, mk it obvious.
- @rogerwhitson i'm not even sure how to create that considering we're discussing texts that we may not even know abt?
@rogerwhitson I am watching. Ironically not participating b/c I'm writing up an essay on same. cc @triproftri
