You are looking at content from Sapping Attention, which was my primary blog from 2010 to 2015; I am republishing all items from there on this page, but for the foreseeable future you should be able to read them in their original form at sappingattention.blogspot.com. For current posts, see here.

Posts with tag Topic Modelling

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Keeping the words in Topic Models Jan 09 2013

Following up on my previous topic modeling post, I want to talk about one thing humanists actually do with topic models once they build them, most of the time: chart the topics over time. Since I think that, although Topic Modeling can be very useful, there’s too little skepticism about the technique, I’m venturing to provide it (even with, I’m sure, a gross misunderstanding or two). More generally, the sort of mistakes temporal changes cause should call into question the complacency with which humanists tend to ‘topics’ in topic modeling as stable abstractions, and argue for a much greater attention to the granular words that make up a topic model.

When you have a MALLET, everything looks like a nail Nov 02 2012

Note: this post is part 4, section 2 of my series on whaling logs and digital history. For the full overview, click here.