{"id":4883,"date":"2018-12-05T07:55:13","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T23:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/?p=4883"},"modified":"2018-12-05T07:55:13","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T23:55:13","slug":"dhdownunder2018-kindness-in-english-novels-in-project-gutenberg-and-scary-mermaids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/05\/dhdownunder2018-kindness-in-english-novels-in-project-gutenberg-and-scary-mermaids\/","title":{"rendered":"DHDownunder2018: Kindness in English novels in Project Gutenberg and scary mermaids"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am attending the Digital Humanities Downunder Summer<\/a> School at the University of Sydney this week.<\/p>\n

I have been playing with R in the afternoons and using Python to play with some distant reading<\/a> techniques in the mornings. No, I did not really know R or Python before this.<\/p>\n

This morning I have read in the entire text of 10 different classic English novels from Project Gutenberg<\/a>, cleaned out the junk text at the start and end of the files, tokenised the novels so that the words are countable…then had a play…<\/p>\n

I counted the occurrence of the word “kindness” in each novel, then plotted whereabouts the word occurs in the novel,\u00a0 using the Python Natural Language Toolkit<\/a>. Fun!<\/p>\n

I discovered very unscientifically, that 1) the female authors use the word far, far more often, 2) when used, there was a very clear pattern of it occurring just at the start and just at the end of the novel. There are two interesting future research projects right there. Compared to what was possible (and in which timeframe and by whom) twenty years ago, what we can do at our desktops right now is quite amazing.<\/p>\n

Here is what I found out about Pride and Prejudice.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

If you get a chance to attend this next year, go for it. The organisers have worked tirelessly to keep things running smoothly and presenters have been very clear, patient and able.\u00a0 They deliberately kept the cost for the week’s registration very low (AUD150 for the week for early-bird registration). Throw in a couple of interesting night-time symposia, starting and ending keynotes by international experts and a tour of the Rare Books collection in Fisher Library and I am not sure where a librarian-who-likes-to-get-hands-dirty could find better value.<\/p>\n

I will just leave this image of rather scary mermaids, from one of the rare books of creatures existing and mythical, here without further comment.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am attending the Digital Humanities Downunder Summer School at the University of Sydney this week. I have been playing with R in the afternoons and using Python to play with some distant reading techniques in the mornings. No, I did not really know R or Python before this. This morning I have read in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3BXdd-1gL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4883"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4890,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4883\/revisions\/4890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}