The University of Houston Libraries Digital Research Commons will host a reading group discussion and workshop.

UH Libraries Digital Research Commons

A reading group discussion on failure will be held Friday, March 23 at 1:00 p.m. Failure is an integral part of academic work, and most of us learn to deal with it in one way or another in our disciplinary training. But failure and its sister experiences – frustration, delay, revision, rewriting – take on new forms in digital research in part because new methods succeed or fail in new ways.

So how can we understand failure as a part of the process of digital research? Reading group attendees should read Stephen Ramsay’s seminal article, “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around” (PDF).

Attendees are welcome to bring a brown bag lunch for the discussion on how to make failure useful.

A workshop on topic modeling will be held Monday, March 26 at 2:00 p.m. Topic modeling is one of the most talked-about digital research methods to have come to prominence in the past few years, and can be an incredibly powerful tool for understanding and making arguments about any large set of texts.

In this 90 minute hands-on workshop, DRC director Claude Willan will explain the concepts behind topic modeling and then walk participants through two tools to do their own modeling.

Please bring a laptop. Please also download the following programs in order to be able to do topic modeling of your own; there is no viable online portal for topic modeling, so you’ll need to download programs to do it on your own machine.

Please first download and install the repository linked here: https://github.com/senderle/topic-modeling-tool

Next, please download R from https://cran.r-project.org/ and R Studio Desktop — a graphic interface for R — from https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/#download.

All of these components are free to use.