15-20 Minute Paper
Kurt Fendt, Jason Lipshin, Jeffrey Ravel, Jia Zhang
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Biographies
Dr. Kurt Fendt is a scholar of literary and cultural studies with extensive expertise in the application of information technologies to humanities research and education. He is Principal Research Associate in Comparative Media Studies (CMS) and Executive Director of HyperStudio – Digital Humanities at MIT.
Jason Lipshin is a graduate student in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program and a research assistant in Hyperstudio, MIT’s digital humanities research lab. In 2011, he was also nominated as a HASTAC scholar.
Jeffrey S. Ravel is an associate professor of history at MIT, where he studies the history of French and European political culture from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries.
Jia Zhang is a native of Beijing China, and a graduate student in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program. She received her BFA in Industrial Design from RISD and MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons where she was a data visualization fellow for the International Budget Project.
Abstract
From early experiments in humanities computing to Lev Manovich’s more recent work
in cultural analytics, there is a long-standing tradition in the digital humanities which uses data visualization to analyze large corpora of historical documents. However, as Dan Cohen notes in a recent essay on Google’s n-gram tool, rather than simply providing easy answers, such visualizations often create more questions for historians, who must use their expert knowledge to discern patterns and anomalies in the data. And instead of simply focusing on the macroscopic in order to generate new insights, historians using such visualizations are often forced to toggle between scales: moving seamlessly “from distant reading to close reading, from the bird’s eye view to the actual texts” (Cohen).
As an international collaboration between Hyperstudio – MIT’s Digital Humanities lab, MIT’s Department of History, and the Bibliotheque-Musee de la Comédie-Française, the Comédie-Française Registers Project (CFRP) seeks to explore such hybrid approaches to historical data. Featuring an online database of ticket sales for the Comedie-Francaise, France’s national theater troupe, from 1680-1793, the CFRP also contains a suite of interactive search and data visualizations tools, which allow for both the filtering of individual documents and the complex analysis of macro-trends, in the same space. Being able to apply different parameters, filter data, and see the results dynamically generated within a set of visualizations, allows scholars to discover patterns and ask new kinds of research questions not possible without the tool. At the same time, being able to pull up and analyze individual documents within the same browser window allows scholars to better ground and understand some of the macro-level trends displayed in the visualization. In this short paper, we will discuss some of the insights arising from the interaction of these two approaches, in order to question some of the ways that quantitative and qualitative methodologies might be combined to further historical research.