<strong>This version of the article is outdated. Please consider a more recent version here: https://zenodo.org/record/166356.</strong> The concept of literary genre is a highly complex one: not only are different genres frequently defined on several, but not necessarily the same levels of description, but consideration of genres as cognitive, social, or scholarly constructs with a rich history further complicate the matter. This contribution focuses on thematic aspects of genre with a quantitative approach, namely Topic Modeling. Topic Modeling has proven to be useful to discover thematic patterns and trends in large collections of texts, with a view to class or browse them on the basis of their dominant themes. It has rarely if ever, however, been applied to collections of dramatic texts. In this contribution, Topic Modeling is used to analyse a collection of French Drama of the Classical Age and the Enlightenment. The general aim of this contribution is to discover what types of semantic coherence topics show in this collection, whether different dramatic subgenres have distinctive dominant topics and plot-related topic patterns, and inversely, to what extent clustering methods based on topic scores per play produce groupings of texts which agree with more traditional genre distinctions. This contribution shows that interesting topic patterns can be detected which provide new insights into the thematic, internal structure of a genre such as drama as well as into the history of French drama of the Classical Age and the Enlightenment.

A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a community documentation project that brings together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, typically March 18. The goal of the project, which has been run three times since 2009, is to bring together participants to reflect on the question, Just what do computing humanists really do? To do this, participants document their day through photographs and commentary using one of the Day of DH blogs set up for them. The collection of these journals (with links, tags, and comments) is, after editing, made available online. This paper discusses the design of this social project, from the ethical issues raised to the final web of journals and shares some of the lessons we have learned. One of the major challenges of social media is getting participation. We made participating easy by personally inviting a seed group, choosing an accessible technology, maintaining a light but constant level of communication prior to the event, and asking only for a single day of commitment. In addition, we tried to make participation at least rewarding in formal academic terms by structuring the Day of DH as a collaborative publication. In terms of improvements, we have over the iterations changed the handling ethics clearances for images and connected to other social media like Twitter.

This extended interview with Geoffrey Rockwell was carried out via Skype on the 28th April 2012. He narrates that he had been aware of computing developments when growing up in Italy but it was in college in the late 1970s that he took formal training in computing. He bought his first computer, an Apple II clone, after graduation when he was working as a teacher in the Middle East. Throughout the interview he reflects on the various computers he has used and how the mouse that he used with an early Macintosh instinctively appealed to him. By the mid-1980s he was attending graduate school in the University of Toronto and was accepted on to the Apple Research Partnership Programme, which enabled him to be embedded in the central University of Toronto Computing Services; he went on to hold a full time position there. Also taking a PhD in Philosophy, he spent many lunch times talking with John Bradley. This resulted in the building of text analysis tools and their application to Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, as well as some of the earliest, if not the earliest, conference paper on visualisation in the digital humanities community. He reflects on the wide range of influences that shaped and inspired his early work in the field, for example, the Research Computing Group at the University of Toronto and their work in visual programming environments. In 1994 he applied, and was hired at McMaster University to what he believes was the first job openly advertised as a humanities computing position in Canada. After exploring the opposition to computing that he encountered he reflects that the image of the underdog has perhaps become a foundational myth of digital humanities and questions whether it is still a useful one.

For roughly a decade (1998-2007) I led new directions activities at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute across the domain of computing and its interactions with engineering, medicine, business, and the arts & sciences. Reflections on this extended multidisciplinary experience have led to the articulation of a new perspective on the nature and structure of computing as a scientific discipline (Rosenbloom, 2004, 2009, 2010, 2012; Denning and Rosenbloom, 2009). In the process has come: a new conception of what a great scientific domain is; the realization that computing forms the fourth such domain, with the physical, life and social sciences comprising the other three domains; the recognition that much of the core content and future of computing is inherently multidisciplinary; the understanding that this multidisciplinarity can be reduced to a small fixed set of across-domain relationships, defining the relational architecture; the demonstration that the relational architecture yields a novel organizational framework over computing; and the application of this framework to illuminating some of the connections between computing and other scientific disciplines. It has also suggested several tentative conclusions concerning disciplines outside of computing, such as that mathematics and the humanities can both be considered as part of the scientific enterprise, but that neither amounts to a great scientific domain on its own. Mathematics instead nestles naturally within a broad understanding of the computing domain, while the humanities fit within a comparably broad understanding of the social domain. The purpose of this article is to further explore these notions with respect to the emerging area of the digital humanities, with their focus on the interchange between computing and the humanities. In particular, we will look at the idea that the humanities can be viewed as a part of science – in fact, as part of the social domain – and at the framework that this yields for understanding the space of relationships between computing and the humanities. Such an exploration requires some understanding of computing, the humanities, and the philosophy of science. I am a professional within the first of these, but no more than an interested amateur with respect to the latter two. So there are inherent risks in this enterprise, but the hope is that the utility of its results will overbalance any naivete exposed in the process.

This article presents an examination of how digital humanities is currently conceived and described, and examines the discursive shift from humanities computing to digital humanities. It is argue ...

For these purposes, the online edition of The Nation is just the thing. And so one day I found myself reading a lament about the present and future of academic English departments. William Deresiewicz’s ‘Professing Literature in 2008’1 is ostensibly a review of a new reissue of Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature. As such, I found it to be trenchant enough,if not about its subject (which it merely glances at, and I have never read) then about its world (which preoccupies it, and with which, at one time, I was very familiar). It stood out in my mind for two things. There was a tidy analogy: by the author’s account, the curricula now offered in English departments are fragmented by fashion and identity politics to such an extent as to reflect nothing so much as efforts, ingenuous or not, to win students by flattery. “If grade schools behaved like this, every subject would be recess, and lunch would consist of chocolate cake.” And by way of depicting the symptoms of the problem, there is an interesting summary of how this fragmentation manifests itself in the want ads posted by departments in the annual mLA Job Information List. “Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, eco-criticism – whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children’s literature, even in something called ‘digital humanities’.”