In the spirit of sharing and keeping people posted, two abstracts for my current research have been posted in my ‘works in progress’ section: “Digging into Music: An Interactive Textual Analysis of the Top 40 Billboard Lyrics Database” and “Mining the ‘Internet Graveyard’: Exploring Canada’s Digital Collections Projects.”
[Above: My Digital Portfolio. c. November 2011 - Mathematica and ActiveHistory.ca (best viewed at 480p or 720p]
PROJECT SUMMARY
The most recent build of my Top-40 Lyrics Database Viewer, which will be posted online as an interactive model this spring/summer. I've posted the code above as it's a good example of some of the Mathematica syntax. This is now is a very speedy and manipulable program (thanks to considerable pre-processing of word and phrase data), and I hope to have it online at some point during the Spring/Summer.
My next major project, “Postwar English-Canadian Youth Cultures: A Digital History, 1945-1990,” aims to expand our understanding of youth cultures through new and emerging digital methodologies. Previous approaches, while fruitful, have focused on a small number of influential youth (often those who went to university or assumed leadership positions). They left records that enable historians to find and interview them, produced documents that were preserved, and in some cases continue to maintain influence. Digital history, the application of digital methodologies to historical questions, offers a means to widen our perspective from these youth alone to gain a synoptic view of youth culture. We can now trace the rise and fall of cultural ideas. Historical digital sources have reached a scale where they defy conventional analysis. The Internet Archive has 2.9 million texts; there are 2.6 million pages of newspapers at the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America; the McCord Museum at McGill has over 80,000 photographs; Google Books has digitized fifteen million books. The amount of accessible digital information grows on a daily basis, making digital humanities projects increasingly feasible, and for that matter, necessary.
Some of my current work in textual analysis (26 September 2011)
Historians can use computational tools to make sense of and process these digital sources. Text mining, for example, enables us to isolate recurring words or phrases, note their frequency in a given year, within specific contexts, and to normalize the information with respects to dates. I will trace the evolution of anxieties surrounding youth amongst youth themselves, observers, and government. Lyrics will also be key, as I will analyze thousands of songs (not just those by the oft-studied Dylan, Beatles, Rolling Stones) to see the relative rise and fall of ideas and certain key words over time. I will approach this project by writing software in the Mathematica programming language, an integrated platform for technical computing that will allow me to process, visualize, and interact with digital historical sources.
Want to learn more? All the nitty-gritty can be found in my SSHRC postdoctoral research proposal, which I have been approved to hold at the University of Western Ontario.
