I'm so thrilled to finally see this in print, and I'm grateful to Jeffrey Alan Miller and Esther van Raamsdonk for shepherding the whole effort! Thanks also to Penn State Press for making the piece free to access for the next 90 days or so: scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/milton-...
This piece is part of the special issue Precarious Milton, which discusses forms of precarity from Milton's time to today, with special attention to the current precarious state of the academic job market. In the essay I reflect on my own experience moving from precarious roles to more stable ones.
In the article I use a mixture of traditional close reading and digital close reading, examining Milton's use of data through text analysis. Along the way I take up William Empson's account of the word "all" in PL, adding to it the word "give" (the literal translation of the Latin term data).
My new article, "Milton's Precarious Data," is out now in Milton Studies! It explores how Paradise Lost addresses problems of uncertainty in observed data, a brand new term at the time. scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/milton-...
Very happy and excited to be returning to Dream Lab again this May to explore early modern book history with text analysis, social networks, and machine learning. Consider joining me in Philly!
Our December feature is now online! 📰 After his talk for our Modeling Culture series, @jrladd.com discusses how AI fits into a long history of text technologies—from the printing press to large language models, as well as his hopes/concerns for AI in humanities scholarship. Read the Q&A below!
Thanks! Yes, developing MorphAdorner was the earliest stage of the project (which has had different names over the years). There’ve been lots of transformations and spot-checking since, so the texts themselves are the more authoritative source for spelling variations. morphadorner.northwestern.edu
And for the original question, you can search for any individual word in its regularized form and get all its variant spellings with the EarlyPrint corpus search: eplab.artsci.wustl.edu/blacklab-fro... (Just click on advanced and search under “reg”.)
Yes! You can download all of EP’s texts and metadata: earlyprint.org/download/. Our texts on are on Bitbucket instead of GitHub, but they work similarly.
Sep 29: "Human and Machine Intelligence in Networks of Early Modern Print" with John Ladd (@jrladd.com), Assistant Professor in Computing and Information Studies at Washington & Jefferson College. Info/RSVP:
Modeling Culture explores AI not only as a technology to critique, but as a new mode of inquiry for research and interpretation. Three interconnected components will unfold in 2025-26: a faculty and grad seminar, a public lecture series, and an open-access curriculum. Public talk details in thread👇
After nearly two years running our homespun ESTC 📚📜, we’ll soon retire it at the request of the ESTC. Proud to have been part of the @print-and-prob.bsky.social team 💪, led by Nikolai Vogler, that helped our scholarly community in a time of need 💜
Had a good time collaborating with @mellymeldubs.bsky.social and the AI for Humanists team on this! It also features some data we've been cooking up for @print-and-prob.bsky.social. Worth thinking about whether you have a research task that a local LLM could help with...
New NEH-supported tutorial on running LLMs locally with ollama! Your laptop is more powerful than you think. Save money, privacy, and energy.
aiforhumanists.com/tutorials/
Had a blast with so many new friends at the @pricelab.bsky.social’s Dream Lab workshop last week! For anyone interested in applying DH methods to book history questions, here’s a mini-site with a guide and all the materials from “Digital Approaches to Early Modern Books”: jrladd.com/digitalbooks/
For anyone interested in #DH and #CulturalAnalytics for early modern studies and book history: I'm very excited about the new Dream Lab course I'm teaching in May! Registration is open now: www.eventbrite.com/e/digital-ap...
Dream Lab presents: “Digital Approaches to Early Modern Books," a #DH workshop hosted at the University of Pennsylvania this May.
I'm so pumped to be teaching this course, and I'm really grateful to @pricelab.bsky.social and @folgerlibrary.bsky.social for making these scholarships available. Let's hang out in May and talk about all the amazing ways you can combine book history and DH!
Glad this is still useful for folks! This is on my feature wishlist for the next iteration of Network Navigator, too (cc @zoeleblanc.bsky.social)
Elon Musk killed our WCW "plums in the icebox" Twitter bot, so I just resurrected it in this custom feed:
bsky.app/profile/did:...
If you are amused by wild poetic text reuse, you might enjoy.
Shout out to my so sweet collaborator @jrladd.com, and take that, Elon!
🤝🏻 welcome to the club
Two grad school buddies in identical shades of millennial mustard
Everyone is laughing at me and @jrladd.com for wearing identical shades of millennial mustard. This is the inevitable outcome of grad school buddies
#dh2024
If you’ve seen our network analysis tool, Network Navigator, check out this article! It situates our work (@jrladd.com, @zoeleblanc.bsky.social) in the larger DH tools ecosystem and explores the role of network analysis in scholarly infrastructure.
https://rb.gy/ppspn6
Study for ‘The Spanish Dance,’ by John Singer Sargent, 1879-80, 📸 via @cjzero.bsky.social
AI for Humanists project logo
🚨New AI for Humanists tutorials just dropped!🚨
We have new code notebooks for using LLMs to:
- measure document similarity
- classify texts with zero-shot prompting
We explore narrative vs non-narrative texts, historical poetry, ChatGPT poetry, & book reviews.
Tutorial effort led by Greg Yauney!