Explorations in Digital Humanities
Documenting my efforts to learn data analysis
I've been messing around with computers for 40+ years. My first computer was an Atari-800. When I worked for John Deere, I was the (only) PC support person at the Columbus branch office -- Deere (back then) focused on mainframes. Since then, I've continued to use computers, but recently I've become interested in using them for big data analysis and digital humanities. My sabbatical project (2022-23) is to increase my proficiency and think about how I can integrate this sort of analysis into my religion classes.
Here's my curricula vita.
The Payroll Protection Plan disbursed an enormous amount of money in 2020 to US businesses. Initially loans, the government ended up converting many of them to grants. I am working with a professor at Northwestern to examine how the PPP funds were distributed to religious institutions, especially Black churches.
I've been looking for textbooks that could be used to teach a DH / analysis course for undergrads. Here are some of the texts I've looked at, with my comments about them.
The US census asks lots of questions but does not explore religious adherence. But every decade since 1970, a group of sociologists have done so. The results of the 2020 US religious census have just been released and I've done some preliminary analysis of it.
I wasn't surprised at what I found by visualizing the social networks from 1 and 2 Samuel, but it provides an interesting illustration of patterns in the text.
Named Entity Recognition on Bible
SpaCy's NER library works pretty well for some texts, but not on biblical texts. Following Melanie Walsh's examples, I ran some NER analyses on some biblical texts. The results were disheartening.
Questions?
Contact aporter at ic.edu to get more information on any of these projects