The joys of Big Data for historians -- The DH moment -- Text mining tools: techniques and visualizations -- Topic modeling: a hands-on adventure in Big Data -- Making your data legible: a basic introduction to visualizations -- Network analysis -- Networks in practice -- Conclusion
The Latin American Comics Archive (LACA)1 is an ongoing project combining capabilities for Spanish language and culture teaching, research in the Humanities, and digital technologies as a tool for expanding the access and analysis of Latin American comics for both scholars and students. Thanks to a Digital Humanities Mellon Seed Grant, LACA started out with a small representative sample of Latin American comics that were digitized and encoded in CBML over the 2016-2017 academic year. In the Fall of 2017, a pilot course allowed students and researchers to access and explore these source materials as pedagogical tools for learning and researching about Spanish language and Latin American culture. The use of digital tagging and annotation tools on the archive enabled for the analysis of the visual and verbal language of comics, as well as cultural and linguistic items or themes, and a variety of formal categories. Students and researchers were able to collaborate in the definition of key terms to be annotated and used for the research of topics in the digitized comics, with the object of ultimately creating or collaborating in critical editions of comics for use by others, and the expansion of the archive, which will eventually be open to general scholarly use by students and researchers. Integrated applications could also allow for the production of short critical interventions in comic format.
We live in a networked world. Online social networking platforms and the World Wide Web have changed how society thinks about connectivity. Because of the technological nature of such networks, their study has predominantly taken place within the domains of computer science and related scientific fields. But arts and humanities scholars are increasingly using the same kinds of visual and quantitative analysis to shed light on aspects of culture and society hitherto concealed. This Element contends that networks are a category of study that cuts across traditional academic barriers, uniting diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of complexity in our world. Moreover, we are at a moment in time when it is crucial that arts and humanities scholars join the critique of how large-scale network data and advanced network analysis are being harnessed for the purposes of power, surveillance, and commercial gain. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.