This came in from Erik Peterson:

What I want to do, I think, is called “topic modeling.” I saw one demonstration using Zotero’s stand-alone app (not the Firefox plugin) and the Papermachines plug-in. I want to use this or something like it. But I don’t know how to start, really. I’ve also been clued in to JSTOR’s Data for Researchers, which I think gets to some of this information, and Web of Science’s citation mapping, which gets to other bits of this. But I confess that I don’t know how to use these pieces of software.

I also wonder if learning Python will help, though the last computer languages I learned were BASIC and MSDOS.

So I am here to learn, and be supportive, but not teach or present!

More background on Erik:

I’m lucky enough to have a dedicated Digital Humanities center at UA, but unlucky enough that it has gotten popular in the last two years. What that means is that, while I’ve had fun working on digital humanities projects with my classes (this one is especially fun: gamearchive.as.ua.edu), I’ve been mostly on the “facilitating” end rather than the “making” end.

So now he needs some expertise and is looking for contacts.