• HC Visitor
Skip to content
Information Ecosystems
Information Ecosystems

Information, Power, and Consequences

Primary Navigation Menu
Menu
  • InfoEco Podcast
  • InfoEco Blog
  • InfoEco Cookbook
    • About
    • Curricular Pathways
    • Cookbook Modules

Ted Underwood

Literature from a distance

2020-09-19
By: Erin O'Rourke
On: September 19, 2020
In: Ted Underwood
Tagged: English Literature, Libraries, Machine Learning, Reading, Ted Underwood

For readers today, there is a wealth of information available about any given work they read, from its date of publication, its author’s biographical information, its genre, details about any previous editions or formats, and the like. On top of that, it seems as though nearly any book is available through online retailers like Amazon, public or university libraries, or as an e-book. With all this information about recent works at our fingertips, it was surprising to learn how much there still is to know about collections of written works that span only the past few centuries. On Friday, September 20, Ted Underwood, professor of English Literature and Information Science at the University of Illinois, addressed the participants of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, answering questions about how data and the absence of data relate to his work. Underwood’s area of expertise is distant reading — drawing conclusions about large collections of written work through an analysis of metadata and other less-subjective characteristics. As Underwood described in Digital Humanities Quarterly, distant reading was a technique in literature long before computers became equipped to help with it. When researchers first had access to computational methods like optical character recognition, which make the full text of a piece searchable, they applied them to a variety of problems, soon realizing what kinds of questions computers are suited to answer. People, rather than computers, are much better at closely reading a single text or the works of one author to characterize them, as well as answering “why” questions, such as “why did Read More

Challenges of metadata and future of digital humanities curriculum on the table with Ted Underwood

2019-09-19
By: Briana Wipf
On: September 19, 2019
In: Ted Underwood
Tagged: digital humanities, fiction, Ted Underwood

Ted Underwood has been poking around in the massive HathiTrust database for a few years now, and it’s taught him that libraries are anything but uniform. During his talk with the Sawyer Seminar on Friday, Sept. 20, at the University of Pittsburgh, Underwood, a professor of English and information science at the University of Illinois, pictured his child-self walking through physical libraries, looking for books. He never guessed that every other library in existence didn’t catalogue their books in exactly the same way. But, as he now works with the metadata associated with digitized books in the HathiTrust database, he’s realized the human side of library science a bit more. He’s learned quite a bit about how physical libraries operate, he admitted. While there is national coordination with Library of Congress cataloguing standards, many of the decisions are up to individual librarians, he said. Underwood was the second speaker in the Sawyer Seminar yearlong series entitled “Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) from the Quantitative to the Digital Age.” He first spoke at a public lecture on Thursday, Sept. 19, and then for Sawyer Seminar participants on Friday. Many of Underwood’s projects deal with large collections of data, including the HathiTrust database, which stores the digitized collections of several universities totaling over 17 million volumes. In the past, he and his collaborators have leveraged that data to find that the number of women writers of fiction declined from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He and his team at Illinois are mining HathiTrust for their latest Read More

Invited Speakers

  • Annette Vee
  • Bill Rankin
  • Chris Gilliard
  • Christopher Phillips
  • Colin Allen
  • Edouard Machery
  • Jo Guldi
  • Lara Putnam
  • Lyneise Williams
  • Mario Khreiche
  • Matthew Edney
  • Matthew Jones
  • Matthew Lincoln
  • Melissa Finucane
  • Richard Marciano
  • Sabina Leonelli
  • Safiya Noble
  • Sandra González-Bailón
  • Ted Underwood
  • Uncategorized

Recent Posts

  • EdTech Automation and Learning Management
  • The Changing Face of Literacy in the 21st Century: Dr. Annette Vee Visits the Podcast
  • Dr. Lara Putnam Visits the Podcast: Web-Based Research, Political Organizing, and Getting to Know Our Neighbors
  • Chris Gilliard Visits the Podcast: Digital Redlining, Tech Policy, and What it Really Means to Have Privacy Online
  • Numbers Have History

Recent Comments

    Archives

    • June 2021
    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • May 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019

    Categories

    • Annette Vee
    • Bill Rankin
    • Chris Gilliard
    • Christopher Phillips
    • Colin Allen
    • Edouard Machery
    • Jo Guldi
    • Lara Putnam
    • Lyneise Williams
    • Mario Khreiche
    • Matthew Edney
    • Matthew Jones
    • Matthew Lincoln
    • Melissa Finucane
    • Richard Marciano
    • Sabina Leonelli
    • Safiya Noble
    • Sandra González-Bailón
    • Ted Underwood
    • Uncategorized

    Meta

    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.org

    Tags

    Algorithms Amazon archives artificial intelligence augmented reality automation Big Data Bill Rankin black history month burnout cartography Curation Darwin Data data pipelines data visualization digital humanities digitization diversity Education election maps history history of science Information Information Ecosystems Information Science Libraries LMS maps mechanization medical bias medicine Museums newspaper Open Data Philosophy of Science privacy racism risk social science solutions journalism Ted Underwood Topic modeling Uber virtual reality

    Menu

    • InfoEco Podcast
    • InfoEco Blog
    • InfoEco Cookbook
      • About
      • Curricular Pathways
      • Cookbook Modules

    Search This Site

    Search

    The Information Ecosystems Team 2023

    This site is part of Humanities Commons. Explore other sites on this network or register to build your own.
    Terms of ServicePrivacy PolicyGuidelines for Participation