[Haskell-beginners] Haskell in the Digital Humanities

[Dan Serban]

Like you said, Haskell is a platform, and people don't use a specific
platform for the sake of using *that* platform. They use it because of
what we call a "killer app".
In the case of a programming language, a killer app is a popular
library with no counterpart in other programming languages.
You might find that Python has a richer set of niche libraries for
text analysis.
I'm not really clear what "topic modeling" entails, but it sounds like
something Haskell's type system might be well suited for.
Sophisticated visualizations? D3.JS is the answer. (Diagrams has the
wrong power-to-weight ratio here, IMO, especially if you're new to
Haskell.)
If you're dealing with dirty data, it sounds like a good idea to
attempt to discover the invariants your data is subject to. Learn how
to extract synthetic key indicators from your data, then use Haskell's
QuickCheck to either discover those subtle universal properties hidden
within the data, or make assertions about them, in order to verify the
consistency of a data set.

Finally, I'd say don't look at this as a black and white decision. If
you can get away with it, make it a hybrid Python/Haskell project and
leverage the best of each world.