Women Writers Project

By Avraham Roos This post is part of a series we will be publishing with projects from the WWP’s Institutes Series: Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist. This post is excerpted from Avraham Roos’s dissertation, “Why is This Translation Different from All Other Translations? A Linguistic and Cultural-Historical Analysis of English Translations of the Passover Haggadah from 1770 to Now.”     Former Google-employee Thomas Mikolov and colleagues introduced “Word2Vec” (Mikolov et al. 2013), a tool for learning continuous word embeddings…

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By Emily Miller Leading up to the July 2021 Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist workshop, I’d been doing some work with the WWP website and incubating a fledgling word2vec project as part of my work on the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities here at Northeastern. The workshop approached, and the R files were prepared and polished. All that was left was to give them a road test. As someone new-ish to DH and learning these tools for my own project,…

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By Juniper Johnson During my time as the 2019–2020 NULab Coordinator, I extended my previous research experience with the Women Writers Project to build an XSLT script for tokenizing element content for the Women Writers Vector Toolkit (WWVT). The WWVT is an online laboratory for learning about and experimenting with word embedding models and features over 20 models created using the Women Writers Online (WWO) corpus and parallel corpora created from the Text Creation Partnership collections. The WWVT models are…

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By Becky Standard This post is part of a series we will be publishing with projects from the July 2019 Institutes Series: Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist. For more information on the seminar, see here.  In July 2019 I was selected to attend the workshop “Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist” expertly hosted by the Women Writers Project (WWP) at Northeastern University. Funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities made it possible for me to travel to Boston…

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By James Clawson This post is part of a series we will be publishing with projects from the July 2019 Institutes Series: Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist. For more information on the seminar, see here.  Woolf’s essays heading into the third decade of the 20th century — especially “Modern Fiction,” “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” and “The Russian Point of View” — show her interest in the changing shape of literature of the time, especially as it related to…

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By Caterina Agostini This post is part of a series we will be publishing with projects from the July 2019 Institutes Series: Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist. For more information on the seminar, see here.  Corpus, Methods, and Guidelines The objects of my research are scientific thinking, language, and modes of communication from 1543 to the 1630s, when astronomer Copernicus, physician Vesalius, scientist Galileo, and numerous others published texts which, from a modern perspective, mark the starting point of…

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One of the interesting intersections of digital humanities scholarship and library science is the use and description of archival records. With the increase of digital materials and information comes a proliferation of digital records and corresponding data. As scholars continue to understand the ways text as data can be conceptualized, defined, quantified, and visualized in the humanities, textual records and metadata are similar topics of recent scholarship. In “The Reconfiguration of the Archive as Data to Be Mined,” Michael Moss,…

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Giants were a serious problem for early modern British historians. For example, in a chapter titled “Whether it be likely that there were ever any Gyaunts inhabiting in this Isle or not” from his “Historical Description of the Island of Britain,” William Harrison offers a lengthy meditation on the historical plausibility of giants, arguing against the idea that the presence of fables in a nation’s historical record should irredeemably discredit that nation’s history. Harrison writes that to “some mens eares,”…

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