Signs@40: Feminist Scholarship through Four Decades: Forty years of Signs via topic modeling, editorial curation, and commentaries
To celebrate it's 40th anniversary Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society has put together a special website (link above) using digital techniques of various kinds, thus providing what may well be the most sophisticated deployment humanities scholarship on the web. And check out the Cocitation Network Graph:
Rather than mapping articles published in Signs, the graph provides a way of viewing the broader field of feminist scholarship that is reflected in the sources cited in the articles that the journal publishes. The assumption operative in this type of graph is that scholarship can be viewed as conversations among various participants represented by particular sources; sources that tend to be cited together are being put into conversation with one another and are thus representative of a particular strain or school of thought within a field.
Out in the Twitterverse Andrew Goldstein remarked:
And I hope people realize there are like 10 free article ideas in the moments when commenters say "but what if you modeled…" @Ted_Underwood
— Andrew Goldstone (@goldstoneandrew) October 28, 2014
And that comment points up an interesting digital divide, not the one between those who can afford the technology and those who can't, but the one between scholars who understand the intellectual potential of these techniques and those who are blind to that potential. For Goldstone is right about those comments; they're a rich field of ideas for further digital scholarship. Who will take advantage of those opportunities?
No comments:
Post a Comment