Tag Archives: Digital humanities

OU/Exaptive Discourse Map software

When I met Dave King, the creator of a data analysis and visualization platform called Exaptive, we quickly realized that the tools he was using with scientists could be applied to my humanities research in Islamic studies. With the support of the University of Oklahoma’s Kelvin Droegemeier (Vice President for Research), Rick Luce (Dean of Libraries), and Carl Grant (Libraries Associate Dean of Knowledge Services & CTO), the Exaptive team created a pilot application (a ‘Xap’) that searched for my research terms (hermeneutics, language, tafsir, etc.) in WorldCat, returned thousands of bibliographic records, and then mapped out visually the other significant words that appeared in those records, clustering the words that occurred most often together. It also mapped out the books whose bibliography entries contained those words, as well as their authors, grouping them visually based on which terms they had in common. Those visual maps were interactive: hover over one term and the related works are highlighted, etc. Each dot on the map served as a link to the WorldCat record and to my library’s book request form. It was a completely new way to discover not only books relevant to my project, but also unforeseen concepts that I had not realized might be important for my research. The discourse maps looked like this:

My role in the development process was to be the researcher guinea pig, testing each iteration of the software on a real research project and participating in weekly update and design meetings. Over the course of 2015-2016 we expanded and refined the Xap until it was quite powerful, but it was not yet stable and robust enough to be made publicly available. As of 2017 I am working with Exaptive to produce a next-generation version of the software that will be easily customizable for specific research projects and textual corpora.

I have made a number of presentations about the original vision and the developing software:

The project and Exaptive were the subject of a May 27, 2016 article “Big data comes to OKC to study everything from quakes to Quran,” by Lucia Walinchus, in the Oklahoma City business and legislative newspaper The Journal Record.

A Customizable Exaptive ‘Xap’

On October 16, 2015, the Digital Islamic Humanities Program at Brown University held its third annual scholarly gathering, a symposium on the subject “Distant Reading & the Islamic Archive,” organized by Elias Muhanna. My presentation was about the OU/Exaptive Discourse Map pilot project:

David R. Vishanoff. “A Customizable Exaptive ‘Xap’ for Charting Currents of Islamic Discourse across Multiple Bibliographic and Full Text Datasets.” Third Annual Islamic Digital Humanities Conference, “Distant Reading and the Islamic Archive,” Middle East Studies Program, Brown University, October 16, 2015.

A full record of the conference, including recordings, is available on the web site of Brown’s Digital Islamic Humanities Project.

The slides from my presentation are available here.

The photo above was taken by Rythum Vinoben.

A Digital Humanities project: Genealogies of Qur’anic Hermeneutics

At IQSA’s 2015 international meeting in Indonesia I presented my vision for a new digital humanities tool, the OU/Exaptive Discourse Map ‘Xap’:

“Genealogies of Qur’anic Hermeneutics: Tracing Trajectories through Online Data.” International Conference “New Trends in Qur’anic Studies,” co-hosted by the International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) and the State Islamic University (UIN) Sunan Kalijaga. Yogyakarta, Indonesia, August 6, 2015.

Here are links to the richly illustrated full paper and the slide show presented at the 2015 IQSA meeting in Indonesia.

Congratulations to IQSA for this lively and diverse meeting, which was a major step toward IQSA’s vision of being a truly international scholarly organization.

IQSA 2015 speakers