By Shaun Williams, IDAH Graduate Assistant
May 9th, 2016
Scott Weingart, a Digital Humanities Specialist at Carnegie Mellon University and a 2011-12 HASTAC Scholar, wrote an excellent introduction to topic modeling, "Topic Modeling for Humanists: A Guided Tour" on his blog back in 2012.
"Topic models represent a class of computer programs that automagically extracts topics from texts. What a topic actually is will be revealed shortly, but the crux of the matter is that if I feed the computer, say, the last few speeches of President Barack Obama, it’ll come back telling me that the president mainly talks about the economy, jobs, the Middle East, the upcoming election, and so forth. It’s a fairly clever and exceptionally versatile little algorithm that can be customized to all sorts of applications, and a tool that many digital humanists would do well to have in their toolbox."
Click here to read the whole article on Scott's blog.
You can find the whole article about Topic Modeling on Scott's Blog.
Here are some other introductory articles on topic modeling that are worth checking out:
- "Beginning Topic Modeling," a post by Nicole Garlic on the HASTAC blog.
- "Topic Modeling: A Basic Introduction," by Megan R. Brett from the Journal of Digital Humanities.