Comments on: Coding a Middle Ground: ImageGrid

By: Editors’ Choice: Coding a Middle Ground: ImageGrid : Digital Humanities Now

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 16:30:36 +0000

[...] Read Full Post Here. Category: Editors' Choice [...]

By: Cameron Blevins

Cameron Blevins — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 13:30:14 +0000

Thanks for the support Ed! Hopefully some people will find it useful, or at least a useful enough framework to tweak for their own needs.

-Cameron

By: Ed Finn (@zonal)

Ed Finn (@zonal) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 05:12:35 +0000

Hi Cameron! I’m glad to see someone else taking up the call for a middle ground in the digital humanities. I think these kinds of hybrid approaches will increasingly come to define the best work in DH. I’m also excited about ImageGrid–I could see using it on scans of contemporary periodicals as well where text-only databases and OCR fail to capture the nuance of page layouts and ads.

By: Cameron Blevins

Cameron Blevins — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 21:12:52 +0000

Charles,

Those are intriguing ideas. They also start to get at the slippery, chicken-and-egg kind of relationship between newspaper readership and newspaper production. Are editors targeting their content for an existing readership? Or are readers self-selecting towards newspapers that mirror their own interests? It would be interesting if geography played more of a role in this process than we might have expected.

-Cameron

By: Cameron Blevins

Cameron Blevins — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 21:07:03 +0000

Thanks so much for this Bob, this is a fascinating paper! Beyond its obvious value, it’s a great reminder of the complexity that goes into digitization and processing historical documents – something I think most of us tend to ignore when we’re searching online databases.

By: Distant Reading and Middle Reading | laurie n. taylor

Distant Reading and Middle Reading | laurie n. taylor — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 12:40:45 +0000

[...] Middle Reading July 13, 2012Cameron Blevins has a very interesting posting about a way of “middle reading.” He’s collaboratively developed programming to support developing ImageGrid which is a [...]

By: Charles

Charles — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 11:27:46 +0000

Cameron, Thanks. Regarding the discrepancy between international coverage in the 1840s versus the 1890s. I wonder if that is driven not by parochialism versus cosmopolitanism but rather by immigrant status. Many years ago I read Walter Lord’s A Time to Stand about the battle of the Alamo (1836). At the back there was a few sentence bio of each of the fallen. I remember being struck by what a high percentage were foreign born. I don’t recall what percentage but it probably would have had to have been 20-40% to catch my eye.

So perhaps papers were supplying international news because there was a demand from people wanting to keep tabs on the old country. Easily testable. International news in cosmopolitan centers such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York would probably have skewed to countries with whom we traded and international events whereas the news in the Texas papers would have skewed towards the country of origin represented by the foreign born population of Texas at that time.

By: Bob Allen

Bob Allen — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:23:31 +0000

This paper from ICADl 2008 may be of interest:
http://boballen.info/PAPERS/NewsGenres.pdf