Sapping Attention
sappingattention.blogspot.com · Group blog · on HN since 2012
Sapping Attention is a blog by a digital humanities scholar on data analysis and visualization of historical and cultural sources.
What HN saysHN links it for its ship route visualizations, the history of peer review, and a critique of Google Books search; one commenter uses it to dispute a claim on major earnings.
32HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
35stories submitted
769story points
3 years agolast shared
2012people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1“Peer review” is younger than we think4 people · 131 points · first shared 2017 · 37 comments on HN
- 2Visualizing 100 Years of Ocean Shipping (2012)4 people · 20 points · first shared 2012 · 3 comments on HN
- 3How Badly Is Google Books Search Broken, and Why?3 people · 135 points · first shared 2019 · 98 comments on HN
- 4Literary Dopplegängers and interestingness2 people · 19 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 5Do cities have a land area? And a literal use of the Joy Division map2 people · 15 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 6Reading digital sources: a case study in ship's logs2 people · 4 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 7Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities1 people · 153 points · first shared 2018 · 236 comments on HN
- 8Multidimensional analysis of plot arcs in thousands of TV and movie scripts1 people · 103 points · first shared 2014 · 17 comments on HN
- 9Google Books and the open web1 people · 78 points · first shared 2018 · 21 comments on HN
- 10Visualizing Ocean Shipping1 people · 29 points · first shared 2014 · 8 comments on HN
- 11What's in the Hathi Trust?1 people · 25 points · first shared 2022 · 2 comments on HN
- 12A brief visual history of MARC cataloging at the Library of Congress1 people · 13 points · first shared 2017 · 2 comments on HN
- 13Investigate onscreen language in about 87,000 movies and TV shows1 people · 10 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 14Shipping maps and how states see1 people · 9 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 15What Years Do Historians Write About? (2013)1 people · 5 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
tgb · 2020-08-28
Even back "in the day" the routes weren't actually following those lines. Here's a neat animation of the routes many ships took (from their logbooks) starting in the 1750's:
http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/04/visualizing-ocean-shippin…
dredmorbius · 2019-08-04
Some history:
"Peer review" is younger than you think. Does that mean it can go away?
https://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2017/09/peer-review-is-younger-t…
Peer review : the end of an error?
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/the-end-of-an-error-peer-rev…
Peer review: Troubled from the start
https://www.nature.com/news/peer-review-troubled-from-the-start-1.1976…
Why the National Institutes of Health Should Replace Peer Review With a Lottery — Pacific Standard
https://psmag.com/news/why-the-national-institutes-of-health-should-re…
rasz · 2019-03-19
>Google Books
broken and abandoned http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2019/02/how-badly-is-google-books…
>Google Finance
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-finance-as-you-know-it-is-goi…
rossdavidh · 2018-08-30
"humanities majors don’t make much less than people who choose to study computer science and finance"
Uh...that's not a true statement, computer science majors make substantially more than humanities majors:
https://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2018/08/some-preliminary-analysi…
abhirag · 2018-05-27
jseliger · 2018-03-21
One hopes the present system will go away: http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2017/09/peer-review-is-younger-th…
The problems are in some ways even worse in the humanities: http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Intellectuals/238354?key=dCUV… than the sciences. Or see https://jakeseliger.com/2013/02/12/a-lot-of-academic-research-may-bare… .
twelvechairs · 2012-04-13
Why not link to the original (much more descriptive) article? http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/04/visualizing-ocean-shippin…
junto · 2012-04-13
I'm wondering whether the early Spanish data was deliberately excluded from the visualization or whether it was actually missing from the data set.
This is data collated by the US Navy (and later discovered by Matthew Maury), but the linked articles doesn't state where the Navy sourced the earlier shipping logs from. Since the US Navy was "officialy" established in 1775, the earlier data cannot have been collected by the US Navy? The visualizations start off in 1750, 25 years before the US Navy existed.
Maybe the Spanish data wasn't available because it wasn't openly shared at the time. Remember at this time such missions were highly secret - a race for resources and distant lands.
I would be interested to know the answer to this. Even if it is just a sample, it is indeed a fascinating look back into a brave new world of exploration and colonialization by Europeans across the globe.
http://sappingattention.blogspot.de/2012/04/visualizing-ocean-shipping…
http://trends.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/ships-and-tools/
http://www.ucm.es/info/cliwoc/cliwoc15.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Fontaine_Maury
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/04/the-age-of-sail-visualized…