This was my sophomore summer with the Literary Lab. I started the summer ready to capitalize on my veteran knowledge and pick up where I left off. I did just that when I spent the the first weeks of summer
Working in the Lab, part 2
I first became familiar with the Literary Lab when I took a class on literary text mining in R with Mark Algee-Hewitt last winter. From discussing the philosophies behind the digital humanities to constructing cluster dendrograms (plus lots of other
Working in the Lab, part 1
On my first day of work, I looked up the term “operationalize” in the dictionary. A mixture of curiosity and sheer pragmatism led me to do this; after all, the project I was about to embark on aimed to “operationalize
Counting words in HathiTrust with Python and MPI
In recent months we’ve been working on a couple of projects here in the Lab that are making use of the Extracted Features data from HathiTrust. To help kick off the lab’s new Techne series, I wanted to take a look at some of the programming patterns we’ve been using that make it easier to work these kinds of large data sets – namely the “Message Passing Interface” (MPI), a set of semantics for spreading out programs in large computing grids.