Tag Archives: text analysis

Benson Latin American Collection, Exhibits, Global Studies, Uncategorized

An Adventure in El Paso, Texas

Leave a comment

One of my favorite parts of being a librarian is the opportunity to participate in community engagement projects. So when the opportunity to work with Albert A. Palacios on a traveling exhibit as one of my rotations, I immediately said yes. The exhibit was a collaboration with the University of Texas at El Paso’s C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, which was especially exciting as a UTEP alumnus. This is part of a long standing partnership made possible by a U.S. Department of Education National Resource Center grant. Our exhibit brought together holdings from the Benson Latin American Collection, the C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections, and the Municipal Archive of Saltillo in a joint physical and digital exhibit about the Mexican Revolution.

A Fight for Democracy exhibit at UTEP
Intertwined Destinies: El Paso and Northern Mexico exhibit at UTEP.

Albert and I traveled to El Paso in May 2025 to finally see the fruits of our labor. When we got to the library’s third floor, Claudia Rivers (Director of the C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections) was hard at work putting the finishing touches on her exhibit. The U.S.-Mexico border played a big role in the Mexican Revolution, which means that UTEP has a lot of special objects in their archives. One of these objects is a commemorative cigar from when Porfirio Díaz and William Howard Taft met at the border in 1909. It was an incredible experience to see these first hand, and to have people from the community view these as well.

Items included in the exhibit.

The next day was dedicated to digital scholarship workshops to local scholars. We had participants from all over the El Paso-Juárez region, and an archivist even drove three hours from Alpine to attend! Elisabet Takehana, Director of UTEP’s Center of the Digital Humanities, taught stylometry using the stylo package in R. Sergio Morales, LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Graduate Research Assistant and Latin American Studies Master’s student, taught ArcGIS’s Online and StoryMap tools for presenting spatial research using the official photographs from Mexico’s 1910 independence centennial celebration. And finally, I taught how to use Voyant Tools and UDPipe for text analysis using telegrams between Francisco Villa and Lázaro de la Garza. By the end of the day, participants had gotten hands-on experience with all of these different digital humanities tools and processes.

Sergio Morales teaching ArcGIS Online and StoryMaps tools.
Ana A. Rico teaching text analysis.

After the workshops, we headed upstairs to the third floor once again for the exhibit opening. The exhibit curated by Claudia Rivers was incredible – showcasing a silk print of Porfirio Díaz, a camera from the early 1900s, and portraits of Francisco I. Madero and his wife which were taken by an El Paso photographer. Though our exhibit didn’t get there on time for the opening (Albert and I learned how to roll with the punches) we were able to direct people to the digital version of the exhibit. All in all, it was a day full of learning and celebration, as well as making connections to scholars in the area.

People viewing exhibits during the opening reception.

Finally, on the third day, our exhibit arrived and we put it up for students, faculty, and the public to enjoy! It was a joy to share the Benson Latin American Collection with a wider audience. The exhibit, A Fight for Democracy: The First Years of the Mexican Revolution, will be displayed at UTEP for the summer and then travel to the El Paso Border Heritage Center in the fall. A second copy will circulate through the Austin Public Library later this year.

Albert A. Palacios and Ana A. Rico in front of their exhibit.

Acknowledgements
This initiative would not have been possible without the support of the following individuals and sponsorships:

C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, The University of Texas at El Paso
● Claudia Rivers, Head
● Susannah Holliday, Assistant Head
● Gina Stevenson, Photo and Processing Archivist

Center of the Digital Humanities, The University of Texas at El Paso
● Elisabet Takehana, Director

Municipal Archive of Saltillo
● Olivia Strozzi, Director
● Iván Vartan Muñoz Cotera, Head of Outreach

LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections
● Melissa Guy, Director, Benson Latin American Collection
● Ryan Lynch, Head of Special Collections
● Jennifer Mailloux, Graphic Designer (special thanks)
● Adela Pineda Franco, LLILAS Director & Lozano Long Endowed Professor
● Theresa Polk, Head of Digital Initiatives
● Ramya Iyer, Grants and Contracts Specialist
● Susanna Sharpe, Communications Coordinator (special thanks)
● Cindy Garza, Accountant
● Leah Long, Administrative Manager

Sponsors
● U.S. Department of Education National Resource Center Title VI Grant
● LLILAS Benson Collaborative Funds

Digital Humanities, Read Hot and Digitized

Quantitative Criticism Lab, or What Happens When a Classicist and a Computational Biologist Walk into a Bar

Leave a comment

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the Libraries’ Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship to encourage and inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

The Quantitative Criticism Lab (QCL) was formed in 2014 as a collaboration between humanists, computer scientists and computational biologists. The project’s unique combination of expertise informs its innovative approach to the computational analysis of Latin literature. And I’m not just saying that as a research assistant for the project!

The lab is led by Pramit Chaudhuri, an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, and Joseph Dexter, a computational biologist and Neukom Fellow at Dartmouth. They recruited me before I knew what digital humanities was, though I was certain that I wanted to do something more with my Classics undergraduate degree other than teaching fifth graders “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” in Latin (“Caput, umeri, genua and pedes”, if you were wondering). 

This digital Classics project uses machine learning, natural language processing and systems biology to study Latin literature and its influence. QCL uses a computational approach to explore the traditional study of “philology”, or the development and history of language in text. The lab’s first development was its tool, Fīlum (Latin for the thread of a web), an apt name given the tool’s purpose to reveal relationships amongst Latin texts by identifying intertextual references in Latin literature. 

For an example of intertextuality, in the epic poem the Aeneid, Vergil uses the phrase “immane nefas”, meaning “huge wrongdoing” to refer to the unspeakable horrors of the underworld. Years later, the author Lucan, in his epic, the Pharsalia, references and adapts that phrase to “commune nefas”, or “collective wrongdoing”, to blame an entire community for the horrors of civil war. Fīlum aids scholars in discovering, tracking, and discussing such connections. 

  • The Fīlum tool’s search interface

So, what makes Fīlum better than a ctrl+f approach? In the example above, a scholar would have to search many texts to even possibly discover Lucan’s reference; with Fīlum, they can search many texts simultaneously. Furthermore, Fīlum can even detect phrasing similar to the search query. 

QCL’s computational approach tabulates similarity, using the concept of “edit distance”, or the number of character changes through additions, deletions or substitutions in two words or phrases. For example, the edit distance of “kitten” and “sitting” has an edit distance of 3. You substitute “k” with “s”, “e” with “i”, and add a “g” – three changes in total. 

What if you have a feeling the phrase you want to use in Fīlum, might be in a different word order? With “Order-Free” searching, the tool searches for any arrangement of the words in a phrase. This is an especially valuable feature since Latin often refuses to follow a regulated pattern of word order.

With its search phrase, edit distance and order free option, Fīlum searches through a selected text or a user-selected corpora of Latin literature from the site. With a free account, users can create a search corpus from a library of texts or upload their own. 

  • Fīlum’s clean and clear results page.

The output cleanly displays results distinguished by each text’s author, work, and highlights the relevant words in each result. For added context, when selected, each result displays the previous and following lines from the text for context.

I have enjoyed both working on Fīlum and using the tool for my research. As QCL continues to improve the tool, I hope other classicists will appreciate not only its value but the interdisciplinary method that built it. 

If you are interested in the project and its study, please stay tuned to information about an upcoming QCL sponsored conference in April, here on the UT Austin Campus:

Digital Humanities Beyond Modern English: Computational Analysis of Premodern and Non-Western Literature https://qcrit.github.io/DHBME/

For further reading on topics like digital classics and text analysis, please see below:

Digital classics outside the echo-chamber teaching, knowledge exchange & public engagement / edited by Gabriel Bodard and Matteo Romanello.

Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature by Matthew L. Jockers.

Critics, compilers, and commentators : an introduction to Roman philology, 200 BCE-800 CE / James E. G. Zetzel.

Philology : the forgotten origins of the modern humanities / James Turner.

UT Library Libguide on Text Analysis by European Studies Librarian, Ian Goodale