Introductions and Tutorials on Topic Modeling

Introductory readings

1. David M. Blei,
•  "Probabalistic Topic Models" (2012) [Note: no need to follow the parts of the article that have math]
• "Topic Modeling and Digital Humanities" (2012)
2. Ted Underwood,
• "Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough" (2012)
• "What Kinds of "Topics" Does Topic Modeling Actually Produce?" (2012)
3. Matthew L. Jockers, "The LDA Buffet is Now Open; or, Latent Dirichlet Allocation for English Majors" (2011)
4. Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, "The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us" [PDF] (2014) (preprint version)
• See Andrew Goldstone's site for exploring and visualizing the topic models on which "The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies" is based. (See also Andrew Goldstone's new site for exploring and visualizing topic models 40 years of the Signs journal)
5. John Mohr and Petko Bogdanov, "Topic Models: What They Are and Why They Matter [PDF]," (2013) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server] | [open-access manuscript version]
6. Lisa M. Rhody,"Topic Modeling and Figurative Language" (2012)
7. Benjamin M. Schmidt, "Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities" (2012)

 

Tutorials and How-to Guides

1. The Programming Historian, "Getting Started with Topic Modeling and MALLET"
2. "Tutorial" plan for workshop by Alan Liu and Lindsay Thomas.