Hello Praxisers, I’m writing today about a dataset I’ve found. I’ll be really interested to hear any thoughts on how best to proceed, or more general comments.

I queried JSTOR’s dfr.jstor.org Data for Research for citations, keywords, bigrams, trigrams and quadgrams for the full run of PMLA. JSTOR gives this data upon request for all archived content. To do this I had to request an extension of the standard 1000 docs you can request from DfR. I then submitted the query and received an email notification several hours later that the dataset was ready for download at the DfR site. Both the query and the download are managed through the “Dataset Requests” tab at the top right of the website. It was a little over a gig, and I unzipped it and began looking at the files one by one in R.

Here’s where I ran into my first problem. I basically have thousands of small documents, with citation info for one issue per file, or a list of 40 trigrams from a single issue. My next step is to figure out how to prepare these files so that I’m working with a single large dataset instead of thousands of small ones.

I googled “DfR R analysis” and found a scholar, Andrew Goldstone, who has been working on analyzing the history of literary studies with DfR sets. His GitHub  contains a lot of the code and methodology for this analysis, including a description of his use of Mallet topic modeling through an R package. Not only is the methodology available, but so is the resulting artifact, a forthcoming article in New Literary History. My strategy now is simply to try to replicate some of his processes with my own dataset.