In class on Wednesday we discussed how distant reading approaches can offer us as we analyze texts. I showed you a quick demonstration of Voyant Tools and how different visualizations encourage you to tease out different aspects of a large text or “corpus” (a collection of texts).
Now it’s your turn to experiment in preparation for submission of Blog Post #2 “On Distant Reading” (due Tuesday 9/23 by 11pm).
Instructions:
- Go to the Voyant Tools home page: http://voyant-tools.org/
- Upload the file of the Linn diary draft compilation (the file I emailed to you on Tuesday 9/16) using the “Upload” button, then “Reveal”
- You should now see a dashboard with several panels. In the top left panel is a “Cirrus” or word cloud. You’ll notice that the most prominent words are conjunctions and pronouns (the, and, of, we, they, etc.) To get at the meatier words, you’re going to want to create a “Stop Words List.” Click on the gear button (see screenshot) and in Options panel pulldown menu choose “English (Taporware)” and tick the box “Apply Stop Words Globally.” Click “OK.”
Choose different words that you find compelling (times of day, military terms, etc.) Make a list of five words that you want to look at further. What happens when you look at the words in the Corpus panel? The Word Trends panel? What else appears to you? What can you learn about word frequencies and words that appear in relation to others that you might not “see” so readily when you’re reading in more traditional methods?
Now you’re going to experiment with different types of visualization.
- Go to the Voyant Tools Index: http://docs.voyant-tools.org/tools/
- Upload your text to Links, RezoViz, and ScatterPlot (note that you’ll have to do this for each visualization tool you choose).
- Go through the Stop Words List application again.
- What does each tool show you in terms of the text? What word associations do you discover? How can you manipulate those associations?
- Keep in mind that there is more to these visualizations than just pretty pictures. They help the researcher to ask questions about a text that might not otherwise come to mind.
Try the same experiment with the diary entry you transcribed. Granted, this is a much smaller body of text, but can you see any words or names that are important in your text AND in the overall diary text?
On Monday we’ll be experimenting with more complex text visualization tools.
