Humanities Data Mining Subject of ‘Issues in Digital Scholarship’ Talk

Peter Leonard

Peter Leonard, librarian for digital humanities research at Yale, will give a talk titled “Making Sense: Data-Mining Large Collections of Digitized Cultural Material,” on Wednesday, Nov. 12, from 3:30-5 p.m. in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons in Bird Library. Leonard’s talk will discuss his recent work using data- and text-mining methods in the digitized content of Vogue magazine and the Financial Times.

Sponsored by the Syracuse University Libraries’ research and scholarship department, the “Issues in Digital Scholarship” series explores how scholars in different fields engage digital technologies as the subject matter of their research, in their research methods, their collaborative work and the systems through which their research is disseminated and preserved. Additionally, the series explores the ways in which the libraries, the university and its technology infrastructure can support these modes of scholarship and sustain their future.

Leonard’s recent work as co-principal investigator of a Google Digital Humanities grant focused on topic modeling as a technique for exposing hidden structure in the Nordic-language volumes in Google Books. He received his doctorate in Scandinavian Literature from the University of Washington.