On Friday, October 19th, Dr. Douglas Seefeldt (Assistant Professor of History, and Emerging Media Fellow) and Dr. James Connolly (Director, Center for Middletown Studies, and Professor of History) showcased their digital history research projects which utilize multiple techniques, the most interesting is topic modeling. Topic modeling is a statistical model method, utilizing computer programs, for discovering and extracting 'topics' and vocabulary patterns within one or many electronic documents. This serves the purposes of analysis and application of analyzed data. Through this analysis, one could more easily verify the validity of a text, narrow down a large list of possible research sources based on key words and phrases, or check for plagiarism and duplicate entries.
Dr. Seefeldt's projects focus primarily on historical texts, like newspaper articles and the analysis and comparison of those documents to find correlative truth. Many times the same incident is reported differently by various sources, the analysis and comparison of the sources leads to evidence of the ways that rhetoric was shaped and how it was conveyed in discourse. Some of these projects include:
