Tag Archives: humanities

Finding “Distances” Between Shakespeare’s Plays 2: Projecting Distances onto New Bases with PCA

By Michael Witmore | Published: July 6, 2015

It’s hard to conceive of distance measured in anything other than a straight line. The biplot below, for example, shows the scores of Shakespeare’s plays on the two Docuscope LATs discussed in the previous post, FirstPerson and AbstractConcepts: Plotting the items in two dimensions gives the viewer some general sense of the shape of the data. “There are more items […]

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The Future of the Humanities Will Be Demand-Led

By Michael Witmore | Published: March 31, 2014

The following is an unpolished contribution to some recent debates about the wisdom of defending, or ceasing to defend, the humanities. In what follows, I do not discuss what is deep, rich, and wonderful about the humanities. People who already care already know. I believe the public discussion ought to start somewhere else. When I […]

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An Ecology of Critical Gestures: Point, Circle and Name

By Michael Witmore | Published: February 17, 2013

In this post I attempt to isolate what I take to be three basic critical gestures that are performed in both “traditional” and “iterative” literary criticism. These gestures are: pointing, circling, and naming. Before giving examples of these three gestures, a few words about what makes them possible in digital work: establishing a corpus, defining […]

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