It was a crazy idea: Take the bulk of the world’s books, scan them, and create a monumental digital library for all to access. That’s what Google ...

Course Notes for Text Mining - Prof. Peter Organisciak - GitHub - organisciak/Text-Mining-Course: Course Notes for Text Mining - Prof. Peter Organisciak

Concordance and NLP software, open-source.

A hopelessly outdated law can criminalise things like using chat clients, playing games or watching sports. Worse, it make research into discrimination illegal

Show me the data!

Elsevier has pretty much established itself as the most hated company in the world of academic publishing, a fact demonstrated most...

[This is an updated version of a blog post I wrote three years ago, which organized introductory resources for a workshop. Getting ready for another workshop this summer, I glanced back at the old …

I had the privilege of participating in The Radcliffe Workshop on Technology and Archival Processing a few weeks back. I was thrilled to be on a great panel with some early career historians and Ma…

Good example of what textmining the literature can accomplish. Also local! (N.b. the computer competed against scientists, not librarians.)

In recent years the Portable Document Format (PDF) has become a ubiquitous format in the exchange of documents; in 2005 the PDF/A profile was defined in order to meet long term accessibility needs, and has accordingly come to be regarded as a long-term archiving strategy for PDF files. In the field of archaeology, a growing number of PDF files – containing the detailed results of fieldwork and research – are beginning to be deposited with digital archives such as the Archaeology Data Service (ADS). In the ADS’ experience, the use of PDF/A has had benefits as well as drawbacks: the majority of PDF reports are now in a standard format better suited to longer-term access, however migrating to PDF/A and managing and ensuring reuse of these files is intensive, and fraught with potential pitfalls. Of these, perhaps the most serious has been an unreliability in PDF/A conformance by the wide range of tools and software now available. There are also practical and more theoretical implications for reuse which, as our discipline of archaeology alongside so many others rapidly becomes digitized, presents us with a large corpus of ‘data’ that is human readable, but may not be amenable to machine-based technologies such as NLP. It may be argued that these factors effectively undermine some of the perceived cost benefit of moving from paper to digital, as well as the longer-term sustainability of PDF/A within digital archives.