Digital humanities is a relatively unknown profession, despite it’s relatively to everyday activities. It was invented in the late 1940s by Roberto Busa who produced an automic grant into a church using a computer program. Since then, digital humanities has spread all across the world, including applications such as google and yahoo. One question that might arise, however, is how to do it.

One method is using algorithmic criticism, or using patterns in words repeated, words emphasized, and structure of sentences. A reader can determine a lot from how an author uses and emphasizes certain words. For example, a person who emphasizes the word “western” may be from the western U.S. Another example could be an author emphasizing “mr.”, which implies the formality of the piece being written is more professional. This algorithmitic criticism can be calculated through the number of documents and documents with the targeted term.

The equation for such an algorithm is tf-idf = 1+tf*log(N/df), where N is the total number of documents, df is documents with targeted term, tf is number of times a single word appears in a single document, and idf is inverse of document frequency. With this equation and the necessary values, a reader can depict the objective of the author. Examples of this can be found in “A Companion to Digital Literary Studies: Algorithimic Criticism.”

Another piece of Digital Humanities can be discussed with “shipping”. Shipping is a process in which two characters’ names seem to go with coordinance with eachother to form a bond that can please the audience or reader. The four mehtods are overlap, stress match, onset conservation, and orthographic transparency. All of these methods use character names that match in their own way to be aesthetically pleasing. With this method, the reader can further dwelve and emerse themself into the reading, and this can further the understanding of the piece of literature.

McCulloch, Gretchen. 2015. “A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Shipping.” The Toast. September 30. http://the-toast.net/2015/09/30/a-linguist-explains-the-grammar-of-shipping/

Schreibman, Susan, and Ray Siemens. 2008. A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Hardcover. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Professional. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/