Pirating Texts

Project Summary

In tracing the publication history, geographical spread, and content of “pirated” copies of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Gabriel Guedes (Math, Global Cultural Studies), Lucian Li (Computer Science, History), and Orgil Batzaya (Math, Computer Science) explored the complications of looking at a data set that saw drastic changes over the last three centuries in terms of spelling and grammar, which offered new challenges to data cleanup. By asking questions of the effectiveness of “distant reading” techniques for comparing thousands of different editions of Robinson Crusoe, the students learned how to think about the appropriateness of myriad computational methods like doc2vec and topic modeling. Through these methods, the students started to ask, at what point does one start seeing patterns that were invisible at a human scale of reading (reading one book at a time)? While the project did not definitively answer these questions, it did provide paths for further inquiry.

The team published their results at: https://orgilbatzaya.github.io/pirating-texts-site/

Click here for the Executive Summary

Themes and Categories
Interdisciplinary Inquiry
Data+, Digital Humanities
Year
2018
Contact
Paul Bendich
Mathematics
bendich@math.duke.edu

Disciplines Involved: English, Literature, History, Geography, Visual & Media Studies

Project Lead: Charlotte Sussman

Project Manager: Grant Glass

This project aimed at further exploring how to better develop different methods for doing humanities based research by combining the open-ended nature of humanities projects with the methodological rigor of fields like statistics and computer science. Lucuan Li noticed the potential for finding new ways to link these methods to the humanities: “The open-endedness gave us tremendous freedom to determine our modes of analysis and which parts of the data we would use.” Orgil Batzaya found drawing links between data insights and historical facts compelling: “We looked at distributions of the concentration of publication in different countries and it was fun trying to link historical periods to peaks and troughs in publication.” Some of these links became profoundly obvious according to Gabe Guedes: “As for the final outcome, I was surprised to be able to see such a strong correlation between historical events and publication volume, to the point where you had very noticeable peaks when countries made substantial imperial forays.”

The team was directed and mentored by Grant Glass, a graduate student in the English Department at UNC-CH. Grant’s own research focuses on the question, what is a text? This project allowed Grant to begin to form the data structure for creating a new edition of Robinson Crusoe by understanding how thousands of copies are related to one another. The experience and insights took Grant by surprise: “I did not think that there was as much variance between the copies as there was. This new understanding of the text will help me describe how reading publics, publishers, and editors shape the text long after the author is gone.”

Related People

Related News

What Happens When Data Scientists Crunch Through Three Centuries of Robinson Crusoe?
Thursday, September 6, 2018
Grant Glass, a Ph.D. student in English and comparative literature at the University of North Caroli ...

Related Projects

Getting Granular on Social Determinants of Health

Social and environmental contexts are increasingly recognized as factors that impact health outcomes of patients. This team will have the opportunity to collaborate directly with clinicians and medical data in a real-world setting. They will examine the association between social determinants with risk prediction for hospital admissions, and to assess whether social determinants bias that risk in a systematic way. Applied methods will include machine learning, risk prediction, and assessment of bias. This Data+ project is sponsored by the Forge, Duke's center for actionable data science.

Project Leads: Shelly Rusincovitch, Ricardo Henao, Azalea Kim

Project Manager: TBD

Investigating oil and gas production in the United Kingdom

Producing oil and gas in the North Sea, off the coast of the United Kingdom, requires a lease to extract resources from beneath the ocean floor and companies bid for those rights. This team will consult with professionals at ExxonMobil to understand why these leases are acquired and who benefits. This requires historical data on bid history to investigate what leads to an increase in the number of (a) leases acquired and (b) companies participating in auctions. The goal of this team is to create a well-structured dataset based on company bid history from the U.K. Oil and Gas Authority; data which will come from many different file structures and formats (tabular, pdf, etc.). The team will curate these data to create a single, tabular database of U.K. bid history and work programs.

On the Shelf: exploring oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico

Producing oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico requires rights to extract these resources from beneath the ocean floor and companies bid into the market for those rights. The top bids are sometimes significantly larger than the next highest bids, but it’s not always clear why this differential exists and some companies seemingly overbid by large margins. This team will consult with professionals at ExxonMobil to curate and analyze historical bid data from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management that contains information on company bid history, infrastructure, wells, and seismic survey data as well as data from the companies themselves and geopolitical events. The stretch goal of the team will be to see if they can uncover the rationale behind historic bidding patterns. What do the highest bidders know that other bidders to not (if anything)? What characteristics might incentivize overbidding to minimize the risk of losing the right to produce (i.e. ambiguity aversion)?