As a participant of the upcoming THATCamp I was asked to outline a session I’d like have. Hmm… Well, I think I can brainstorm a few possibilities:

• Exploiting R – R is a increasingly popular open source statistical tool/programming language. I’d like to get up with others to discuss how it can be used in the digital humanities.
• Graphing texts – There are many ways texts can be “measured”. I can count the number of words, the parts of speach, and the reading level. I’ve begun to count the “greatness” of a book as described in a number of blog postings. Once these sorts of things are measured, I’d like to discuss with people ways these measurments and be illustrated through the use of charts and graphs. A picture is worth a thousand words.
• Integrating digital humanities with libraries – As a librarian one of my ultimate goals is to figure out ways digital humanities computing techniques can be seamlessly integrated into library collections and services. Instead of a library “catalog” simply pointing a person to a text, I’d like it to offer services allowing the user to… use the text. Maybe we can create a prototype of such a thing.
• Reducing ambiguity – In one of my “experiements” I wanted to assess a set of works’ use of the word “being”, as in the thing, but the analysis returned too many false-positives because the word was being used as a verb and not a noun. Such a problem is not uncommon, and I’m wonding how it can be resolved.

‘Just some ideas, and please be gentle with me. I’m a noob.

—
Eric Lease Morgan