Overview

The Dangerous Art of Text Mining celebrates the bold new research now possible because of text mining: the art of counting words over time. However, this book also presents a warning: without help from the humanities, data science can distort the past and lead to perilous errors. The book opens with a rogue's gallery of errors, then tours the ground-breaking analyses that have resulted from collaborations between humanists and data scientists. Jo Guldi explores how text mining can give a glimpse of the changing history of the past - for example, how quickly Americans forgot the history of slavery. Textual data can even prove who was responsible in Congress for silencing environmentalism over recent decades. The book ends with an impassioned vision of what text mining in defence of democracy would look like, and why humanists need to be involved.

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9781009262989

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Reviews

"'An ambitious work that demonstrates how quantitative methods can inform the study of the past while also making a compelling case for how historical methods should inform the work of data science. Guldi outlines a middle ground based on ""hybrid thinking,"" where historians and data scientists can meet to think critically about how data is used and abused to understand the past and present.' Spencer Dean Stewart, H-Net"

'An ambitious work that demonstrates how quantitative methods can inform the study of the past while also making a compelling case for how historical methods should inform the work of data science. Guldi outlines a middle ground based on ""hybrid thinking,"" where historians and data scientists can meet to think critically about how data is used and abused to understand the past and present.' Spencer Dean Stewart, H-Net

Author Information

Jo Guldi is Associate Professor of History, Southern Methodist University, and Director of the Digital Humanities Minor. Her publications include, as co-author with David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge, 2014).

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