RELI/ENGL 39, Fall 2015, University of the Pacific

Author: c_castellanos

What’s your textuality?

The Radiant Textuality piece that explained the convergence from physical text based analysis to online based analysis in an effort to provide transparency in all research and historic files to anyone that may want to access them around the world for free online. It was through the perspective of a researcher so the opinion to provide all text based research and information online may be biased.

I do find effectiveness in having the information available the way the writer put it as expanding the worlds knowledge and understanding of the given subject and hopefully will add to the research or use the research for their research. It is about providing information to people in order to assist them in their research starting by making all research public that the same research is not conducted twice.

I also agree with the text in that as the digital footprint for information and research grows it also encourages other scholarly people to be a part of the online revolution and also publish their works digitally. I would also agree with the text that people need to stop ignoring the digital revolution amongst us and we must upload and archive important physical papers that have yet to be published. It would facilitate the research work for many scholars that still find themselves searching for data in library textbooks.

-CC

In class Voyant use

My group explored website #2, it was a tumblr blog on Nirvana and their rise to success so quickly. It showed concert dates, videos, mapping information on concerts and a website link to more information. The website itself did not have sufficient text to look further into it through Voyant so we looked up the link that it offered. It had a chat room page where fans were able to comment on Nirvana through there. We wanted to research the way that Nirvana fans spoke about Nirvana and ultimately could not find any information on their comments because we did not have login information. When putting the initial website link in Voyant and nothing of relevant information towards our research question was available. -Group 2

Words as Indicators

After multiple trials and focusing on different aspects that Voyant offers the most useful to me is how it allows you to understand the text that the most frequently used word is used in. So the unique part about this feature I’d say is how it puts all the sentences that have the word in it all together in one place. From reading the sentences including the word one can gain understanding the context further. Something that could not be done in a regular “find this word in a text” system is that it doesn;t comprise all the phrases in one location in the way that Voyant does. -CC

The Unnecessariness of Voyant

I am one for innovation and efficiency, but I believe that while Voyant completes a task of highlighting and identifying words that are frequently used in the text it does not tell you anything else about the text. It’s innovative in the approach that it has not been done at that magnitude before but finding specific words through mostĀ online documents is really simple to do, like Voyant though no other information about the searched word’s relevance to the main theme of the passage is disclosed. I guess what I am having trouble understanding is how it helps us understand and interpret literature better. I don’t think that know the amount of times that descriptive words or nouns are used in a given length of a passage is as important because those highlighted words, although used frequently, say nothing about the way they are being used which can skew an interpretation drastically. -CC