When we started this week I had a lot of questions about what the point of a Digital Humanities project was and how people made them. I learned that people use digital humanities projects as a way to condense information or sources in order to get a better understanding of the topic or info they are trying to find out about. It’s a great tool for research purposes because the projects do all the “hard lifting” for you, you don’t always have to go looking for more sources on a topic if a project exists that will summarize and present multiple sources in a coherent way. One way I see myself gaining from learning about these projects is by bettering how I do my research. Now instead of losing myself in one or two sources, I can try to find a digital humanities project to kick start the research process. One question I do still have though is who comes up with the ideas for these projects, what makes them want to create the project and what makes them do it a certain way? Like why specifically use T-SNE and a Bokeh Model, what makes that the best option for the project?
Author: Chris
Who Reads What?
https://gr.pennds.org/adultfiction
Sources
Goodreads, a social reading website, randomly selected about 1,750 highly active Goodreads users in 2017. Specifically users who had posted at least 150 reviews
Process
Look at the genres readers assign to books through their Goodreads shelves. Each book is assigned to a genre based on how its readers tend to categorize it. For example, if most readers shelve a book as a mystery, it gets classified in the Mystery/Crime category
An algorithm called t-SNE is used to compare those profiles and compare how similar readers are to one another.
Presentation
Presented as an interactive Bokeh visualization. Each reader appears as a colored dot on a map,
Nearby dots = readers with similar genre tastes.
Different colors = different primary genres.
Readers surrounded by mostly the same color are described as “univores,” meaning they mainly stick to one genre.
Readers located among many different colors are more “omnivorous,” meaning they read several different genres.
