Ways of Being in the Digital Age: Concept Visualisation Interface

Project Overiew

The Institute of Cultural Capital at the University of Liverpool, in collaboration with 17 other partner universities and organisations, undertook the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) scoping review on “Ways of Being in a Digital Age”. The aim of the scoping review was to inform potential future ESRC initiatives in this area, providing a holistic view of how digital technology mediates our lives, and of the way technological and social change co-evolve and impact on each other.

As part of the review, The Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield applied concept modelling techniques to a curated corpus of 1,900 journal articles from the period 1968 to 2017. Concept modelling is a computational linguistic process that involves identifying the emergence of concepts, or key ideas, via lexical relationships. For the purposes of the review, lexical relationships were limited to high frequency co-occurrences of terms as pairs and trios. The process is entirely data driven and resulted in 2 million rows of data.

This website provides access to the top 50 most frequently occurring pairs and trios through a series of data visualisations.

Concept modelling was developed by the University of Sheffield's School of English and The Digital Humanities Institute as part of the Linguistic DNA project.

Project Team

  • Corpus creation: Dr. Stephen Crone, Dr. Gerwyn Jones, Dr. Liz Robson
  • Method development and linguistic analysis: Dr. Iona Hine, Dr. Seth Mehl
  • Algorithm development and data processing: Matthew Groves
  • Data visualisation interface: Ryan Bloor

Official project website: http://waysofbeingdigital.com