Grammar of Shipping!

Okay who here has heard of grammar of shipping? Neither have I. Just like how seeing digital humanities together sounded confusing to me, so does this term. Grammar of shipping might sound like something that has to do with wording and then also the transportation of goods. However, it is far from that. Let me just say that this article completely threw me off the first time I read it. So, how do we get digital information? When we use the search boxes on which ever search engine we use, it gives us over a million different hits. It doesn’t give us all of them, but it does give us the ones that it thinks is important. The next question is how do they narrow it down to those certain results. The algorithm here takes that phrase and matches important parts of it with other data points. Whatever we search for, they basically get rid of words like “a, of, the, an” and etc., because those aren’t significant in the search. They narrow it down to key words, for example, if you type in “the brown bear at the Lincoln park zoo”, they’ll only search for “Brown bear Lincoln Park Zoo.” Then they match those words that you searched for on other sites that have these exact words on them. Tf-idf actually serves a lot of different purposes besides this. It can analyze any types of literary work as well. With the help of tf-idf, we can learn about characters in a book that we never read. We can also learn about the book itself. It will generalize a book for us, and basically tell us what the subject of it is. Being able to use digital tools like this, definitely shows what digital humanities is about!