Bibliography on Text Analysis, particularly Stylometry and Topic Modelling

[Update, 2012-01-28: The bibliography has changed its name, has received a new URL, and has been thoroughly reorganized. All stuff related to text analysis is now in the collection called, well, “Analysis”. The tagging system has been simplified, too.]

Release early, release often, and talk about it. Isn’t this one of the credos of the digital humanities? In any case, I don’t feel like waiting any longer and would hereby announce to the world that DARIAH’s collaborative, public online bibliography about selected digital humanities topics is online over at Zotero, and that it also includes a collection specifically about Text Analysis.

The “Text Analysis” bibliography is already in release number 2, and currently lists 204 items. Most of them concern stylometry and author attribution, another larger group is on topic modelling. There are also some items concerned more generally with text analysis. Many of the items include the abstracts.

“Text Analysis” collection in the DARIAH bibliography

The least obvious feature, whose usefulness will only be proven with time, when the bibliography grows, is the tagging of the items with a controlled vocabulary. In fact, this is most useful not when you are looking at one of the collections, such as the one about “Text Analysis” or one of the other collections; my favorite one is “Perspectives on Digital Humanities”, with plenty of stuff on what DH really is, was, or could be in the future, as well as how it is perceived in mass media, but there is also a nice one on “Software, Tools and Services” which is actually a huge list of tools relevant to DH.

Anyway, back to the tagging with the controlled vocabulary. This entirely follows the “smart data” approach (instead of the “big data” approach): there is a controlled and limited vocabulary that helps classify each item according to several categories, among them activity (with items such as enrich, create, compare, etc.) and object (with entries like music, text, artefact, metadata). The idea is to allow for faceted browsing across individual collections, so that you can find papers and tools relevant to things like “enriching of metadata” or “comparing music”.

All bibliographic collections are works in progress and are being updated irregularly, whenever we feel we have enough new items to warrant a new release. You can contact us when you have an item you would like to see in the bibliography, although we are not going beyond in-DARIAH collaboration right now. In any case, go have a look, browse around, and hopefully, find some useful things! (And if not, tell us, here or over at the bibliography!)