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

Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 2)

Specifying the Digital Humanities

I think one thing we all learned from our readings last Thursday was that “specifying” the digital humanities isn’t exactly easy. There are multiple reasons for this, of course, not the least of which that, as an emerging field, all the scholars of digital humanities are having a particularly difficult time deciding whether the basis for digital humanities should be theorizing about it or actually practicing it. There are several other conflicts, including how the “digital” part should interact with the “humanities” part of digital humanities. Many scholars are unsure whether people should be using technology to study the humanities, or if technology should be studied in terms of the humanities. Observing all these disagreements, you can see why it’s pretty difficult to define exactly what the digital humanities is.

I think, perhaps, the most important idea that Spiro introduced in ways of defining the digital humanities is by introducing a set of common principles among digital humanities scholars. This would unite the interests and possibly the general aims of digital humanities research, even though there are already several divisions regarding what that research should actually be. Spiro strongly implied that collaboration was the most important aspect of digital humanities research, as well as openness (which, I might add, could be depicted as a facet of collaboration), diversity, and experimentation. Altogether, Spiro’s values can be construed into establishing a more united identity for the field of digital humanities, despite the multiple conflicts that occur within the parameters of digital humanities work (like the two I mentioned in the first paragraph).

Mark Sample, while his article was much shorter and less repetitive than Spiro’s, also got his point across that, even though the field of digital humanities is already experiencing several divisions about how the research should be conducted, collaboration was key to the main goal of digital humanities, that is: spreading knowledge. Sample states that it doesn’t matter how scholars go about doing their research, as long as they share it in the end.

The digital humanities is particularly beneficial to scholars of all fields because, as Sample says, it enables us to more easily share our research, no matter what it is about. Digital humanities provides the means for the important communication that Spiro describes, as long as we do exactly what we should as digital humanities scholars, that is, collaborate about our findings.

I think, perhaps, the most evidential aspect of digital humanities that we, as a class, have already experienced is when we form our groups and communicate our different perspectives as to the readings or whatever other topic we’re discussing that day. We collaborate, and thus gain a broader sense of what we are talking about through the different perspectives. How cool is that?

 

Digital Humanities: What And Why

Digital humanities are the research of the technology and humanities and how they intersect with each other.

While that is the definition of the phrase, the actual study of it is more complicated than merely that. As Mark Sample explains in “The Digital Humanities is Not about Building, It’s about Sharing,” there have been debates of whether the digital humanities should be practical application (for lack of a better phrase) or theoretical. However, rather than the production of knowledge for either points, it should be the reproduction, “the way the digital reshapes the representation, sharing, and discussion of knowledge.”  Sample puts an emphasis on the new forms of communication, trusting it to be what the digital humanities is about, noting that communication is how the communication will aid in identifying who is credible.

While what the author writes is true, that the digital humanities center around sharing information, that is not what the digital humanities are about. Sharing plays a huge role, but the actual study banks on, as Sample himself explains, either the practical application or the theoretical. The new forms of media are merely the vehicles that propel the idea forward.

Lisa Spiro appears to be in accordance with Sample’s idea that there have been debates concerning what the digital humanities are about. However, she takes a more proactive view on how the definition of the digital humanities should be settled, attempting to identify certain regulations that will make the digital humanities and its researchers more credible and legitimate. She suggests a statement of values that will unify said researchers as it will set a common goal, and further explains how to develop one. Spiro emphasizes that the community must come together and agree on a set value in order for it to have a value. However, the digital humanities is quite different from other traditional studies, having different focuses, making it difficult to define in a traditional sense. the digital humanities’ intrinsic values are vastly different as well, the internet being a novel medium of freedom and morality. The author brings all of the information together by proposing values, including openness, collaboration, diversity, and several others.

In class, we learned about the various programs and theories behind the digital humanities that seem to promulgate what the digital humanities are about. Voyant is a tool that aids in capturing the style of writers, dissecting their words and comparing them to other writers, representing the “practical aspect.” On the other hand, representing the theoretical, myriads of articles explain of the hazards or benefits of digital devices. Just as other studies encompass both a practical and theoretical aspect, so do the digital humanities. Both forms add to the knowledge of how technology has changed humans and vice versa. Thus, the importance of studying the digital humanities lies in what we gain from the studies; an understanding of the impacts of technology and how we can further/stop using the technology should it prove to be beneficial/harmful to us.

Digital Humanities in Our Lives (Sep 8)

Both articles focus on the uses of digital humanities in people’s lives. Although both authors discuss about the benefits that digital humanities offer, they do not think there is an agreed definition about digital humanities. For example, Lisa Spiro’s article mentions that we should “develop a flexible statement of values that help identify the digital humanities”.

Both articles discuss a substantial amount of positive changes that digital humanities will bring. In Mark Sample’s article, Sample mentions that digital humanities can “reshape the representation, sharing, and discussion of knowledge”. Lisa Spiro’s article also talks about how the digital humanities will help promote “scholar innovation and democratization of knowledge”.

I believe the digital humanities will be useful in terms of gathering information as our academic resources. When the Internet became widespread, most people look for scholar resources on the Internet nowadays. We conduct research and find data on useful websites such as Google. The digital humanities also give us a different option of showing up to job interviews. People will be able to use digital tools such as Skype to conduct an interview. I was also able to use digital tools such as laptops in class for class activities. I think that the digital humanities might be able to create a new and exciting learning environment for us. The digital humanities will also benefit our societies because they make everything more convenient and easier to do than before.

Although the digital humanities may benefit the societies, Spiro’s article mentions that the digital humanities “will need to demonstrate how it can advance humanities research, provide support for teachers who want to use digital tools”. I agree with her ideas that the digital humanities might have certain drawbacks. For example, the digital humanities may increase our reliance on digital tools.

 

wordle

 

Source: http://www.tdbowman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/wordle.png

The Digital Humanities

I remember Googling “Digital Humanities” before I took this course, hoping to find a good definition to help me understand the class more. Even after the Google search, reading various articles, and being in class for two weeks, I still don’t have the full understanding of it. But maybe that’s all right. I feel like Digital Humanities is open to interpretation by everyone. In all the articles we’ve read, we haven’t had a complete agreement on what Digital Humanities actually is. However, we can all agree that it’s an exciting concept and provides a new way to look at the world around us.

 

In “The Digital Humanities is not about building, it’s about sharing,” Mark Sample states that Digital Humanities involves “reproduction of knowledge.” We can see an example of this with Voyant, which we used in class to further our analysis of various works and open our eyes to things we had not seen before. In addition, “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities” by Lisa Spiro details the author’s thoughts on Digital Humanities. She mentions that the Digital Humanities “seeks to push the humanities into new territory by promoting collaboration, openness, and experimentation.” This refers not only to her wanting the community to collaborate and connect, but also to showcase her own answer of what Digital Humanities is and why we need it. Whenever we discuss the articles in class, I am always pleased to hear everyone interpret the articles in a different way but still collaborate with each other and agree on certain things. When we do so, everyone learns new things and sees things from a different perspective.

 

We all have our interpretations of the Digital Humanities, but one thing is certain: It makes us look at the world in a new way.

The Digital Humanities are…???

So…What are the Digital Humanities? After I had enrolled in this course I had trouble telling people that I was going to take a Digital Humanities course. I had trouble, because I really did not know how to describe the Digital Humanities. I thought that it was a branch of the Humanities relating to digital technology – how things like art and literature connect to technology. But after the first week of the course, I am not entirely sure. This post will be my way of “thinking aloud” and producing an answer to the question: what are the Digital Humanities?

I read the Sample and Spiro texts with the hope of finding a clear description of Digital Humanities, but I might be more confused than before, because it does not seem like Sample or Spiro know how to describe the Digital Humanities. The reason that they cannot give a clear definition to the Digital Humanities is because people are still debating to this day what the Digital Humanities are. There is division between Digital Humanists, to quote Sample: “One tension in the digital humanities that has received considerable attention is between those who build digital tools and media and those who study traditional humanities questions using digital tools and media.” Are the Digital Humanities about creating or studying? That is the question to answer.

I’m currently just a student taking a Digital Humanities course, so I could be wrong, but I believe that the Digital Humanities can be both about creating and studying. I could be wrong, but I am sure that the Humanities is made of artists who produce literature and works of art and scholars who study the literature and works of art. The Digital Humanities can be that too, especially if the Digital Humanities is seen a branch of the Humanities. In class, I’ve had to use Voyant, a digital tool, to dissect and examine dozens of documents, and in another class I’ve listened to Dr.S talk about the idea of putting a person’s mind into a machine and the idea of programming the mind itself. The Digital Humanities can be about creating and studying. I will conclude with a quote by Spiro: “I believe that articulating a set of values for a community should be done by the community.”

Digital Humanities & Our Interpretations

When first studying digital humanities, we ask ourselves “what is digital humanities” and “why is it so important to us.”  From my perspective, it is a new medium that tries to help people understand the changing world through some digital programs.  However, it also distracts us from acquiring a better comprehension of today’s society as a whole because most programs are making us become less common with others.  The first few weeks of class were very interesting as I gained some insight on how digital humanities is relevant to the world around us.  Some of the readings were a bit difficult to comprehend, but it later made sense as I thought about it has recently affected modern society.

According to the two readings about defining digital humanities, both authors explained their interpretations on how it has impacted our lives through positive and negative aspects.  The first reading illustrated how the digital media is reshaping knowledge that expands a bit more than from printed resources.  It analyzed the way the public needs to share their knowledge to the public instead of dividing ourselves with programmed software.  In Lisa Spiro’s document, she talked about how digital humanities should challenge people into figuring out different ideas that would help their community be more open and collaborative towards the public.  This emphasized that as a community expands their knowledge, they have to consider the possibilities in also extending their relations to others who share those same views.

In conclusion, I believe that digital humanities can be both useful and distracting depending upon a person’s interests and opinions.  There is no right or wrong answer to how people define digital humanities, as long as they are able to express their ideas that can possibly change the world and it’s future.

~ Danielle Lee

Defining digital humanities ….

According to one of the required articles I read for the reading the author says “It is imperative that digital humanities work take into account the important insights of disability studies in the humanities, an interdisciplinary field that considers disability not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do.” Digital humanities is becoming increasingly popular as far as focus. There are now hundreds of digital humanities centers worldwide and the digital humanities subject is taught in at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Yet, there’s no solidity yet in defining digital humanities. The first article, “The Digital Humanities is not about Building it’s about Sharing” by Mark Sample was very similar to te title of the article. Sample believed that in Digital Humanities, knowledge is not produced and is shared and reproduced.

The term is much debated and has not yet fully established its identity due to the fact that researchers are still continuously finding more and more things they can do with DH tools and methods. So just because no one really knows the exact definition, we still may have an idea.  There are many different outlooks and and opinions about how people define the term digital humanities. I don’t believe that there is a right or wrong answer as to what you think digital humanities is, it’s more of what you get out of it. After just a couple weeks of being in class I’m still not exactly sure what DH is but thus far my outlook on digital humanities is that it expresses the fields of computer science, an area of research. Digital humanities gathers information from articles published over the past 10 or so years and explores the digital humanities field. DH looks at current and past events.

 

 

Ahmanni S.

Digital Humanities

What is Digital Humanities? Why the Digital Humanities? I still not sure after a few week in the class what digital Humanities still is.  We have been shown so many examples over the last two weeks. In the first reading Ian Bogost he is points out that most of our live are control in some aspect by an algorithm. The second reading which was one of the hardest thing I have ever read to comprehend. The next few reading were a little easier to understand they were about how technology can be used to scan reading the program we introduced to was Voyant. The article scanned court cases from the time of the civil war they showed how certain words were referred to slavery one was one and these cases were from the south and how the one from the north were different. The clinical meaning of what Digital Humanities is according to google it is the study of the intersection of computing and the discipline of Humanities. Some of our reading have been very confusing to me. But as I write this post I think a few thing our coming together for me now. Example when we used Voyant we looked at Shakespeare work. We looked at the word “love” throughout his works, in some of the stories where the love appeared like some of his comedies “love” was very frequently used. The why of digital Humanities, computers and technology let us as human study so much more and so much faster when it comes to information. I would hate to think how long it would take to read and analyze Shakespeare work to see if there was a pattern with it coming to a frequency of a word used. Technology does makes our live easier but we also have lost some of what we call the personal touch. I was a manager in the restaurant business for over 20 years. When I first was in the business world it was us going filling out an application and handing it to a manager, now it go to our website fill it out and I am sure there is an algorithm picking out who they talk to a for an interview.

What is Digital Humanities? (Sept 7)

Articles World Bubble

The cirrus generated above is based on the four most recently assigned readings; clearly, they all discuss the digital humanities and sharing (disregard pingback as it is just an automatic notification). It also includes interesting words that describe the digital humanities such as scholarship, imagine, share, new, ideas, debates, and communication.

Being a newly emerging field of the humanities, digital humanities has not fully established an identity. I believe the main reason to this is that there is, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick describes it, a “theory-practice divide.” There are scholars who use digital technologies to study traditional humanities objects and there are those who use methods of contemporary humanities to study digital objects. With that being said, Mark Sample, author of the article “The Digital Humanities is Not About Building, It’s About Sharing,” describes the “heart of digital humanities” as the reproduction of knowledge. Furthermore, Andrew Smith’s “The Promise of Digital Humanities” proposes that the most promising aspect of the Digital Humanities is the machine analysis of texts, also known as data mining.  But now that we know that digital humanities has its prospects, practices, and problems, what is it exactly?

The digital humanities, to my knowledge and in the simplest form, is a cross between computing and the humanities, purposed to share ideas and create a new, public channel for scholarship. In my experience (four two-hour classes of an introductory class), there has been a huge emphasis on our relationship with technology. It is no secret that we are on the horizon of an internet age, or what some may call an algorithmic culture, or even a computational theocracy. Therefore, we as modern creatures have created many digitized habits.Although the digital humanities clashes with the norm, it promotes openness, collaboration, and experimentation. Nonetheless, I believe the digital humanities is purposed to “pursue a public role for scholarship,” as Lisa Spiro (“Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities”) words it. The digital humanities should not be debated about, rather embraced by both types of scholars (whether that be more humanities or digital-oriented) and used as a community to share. In this new technology-governed society, traditional humanities is being repurposed, beginning with digital humanities.

 

Digital Humanities: What is it?

Since being in this class, we have been exposed to many things: Cybernetics, technology, text tools, etc. These are all a part of the Digital Humanities. Now, I have not yet been able to find a very straight forward definition for the term, but I believe it symbolizes so many things. The DH (Digital Humanities) can be referring to things such as: using a computer to type up a paper, using a cell phone to send a text message to your friend, or communicating with someone through skype.

The topic that most interested me throughout the beginning of the course, has to be the topic about algorithms, and whether or not we associate them with having god-like abilities. The culture of algorithms includes different aspects, including: Netflix recommending you watch things, based upon things you have previously watched, determining the retention rate at a university, or using text analyzing tools, such as Voyant, to find a deeper meaning to a set of text. This intrigued me because it opens up one’s thinking to other possible answers to various questions. The algorithmic culture that is upon is, is flourishing, and we are becoming more and more dependent upon things to just hand us information, instead of coming up, or thinking of it, ourselves.

The digital humanities is further examined by Mark Sample, and stated that it is not about building, but about sharing. Sample constitutes that a person is supposed to expand upon another person’s idea, or work, in order to move the development of that particular field forward. Lisa Spiro, in her essay, speaks more on behalf of “collaboration,” and how different humanists are supposed to share their work, including ideas about different technology, as well as their own personal points of views on certain aspects of the DH. When you factor in the matter of communication amongst humanists, the best way is through the technologies, because it allows them to communicate much quicker.

So all in all, the digtal humanities has been evolving day by day. Its been pushing more and more to a technological field, allowing the communication between humanists to be much easier, as well as being more centered around “collaboration”.

Defining the Digital Humanities

The question of whether or not there is an actual definition, which defines the digital humanities, seems daunting. As mentioned in Mark Sample’s article, the divide of those who build and those who study the digital humanities is a contributing factor as to why there is no set definition. Personally, if I was to create a definition for this term, it would be along the lines of “a new era in technology in which a human dependency is placed on technology.” This definition is supported by our class conversations on algorithms. For example, in The Matrix we saw the main character instantly download an algorithm code so he would be able to practice karate against his mentor. In a more practical setting, we live in an algorithmic culture in which we place blind trust in. A simple example of this is Netflix. The billion dollar company has its own system which provides movie and television suggestions based on the shows you watch. I am a fan of the NBC television show, Frasier. After watching the entire series, Netflix suggested I watch CheersThe Dick Van Dyke Show, and Everybody Loves Raymond. Originally following through on these suggestions I discovered that I am more of a fan of Everybody Loves Raymond than Cheers and The Dick Van Dyke Show. However, I placed blind trust in Netflix’s algorithm and “suffered” through several shows in order to come to the decision that maybe I shouldn’t be watching these television shows.

However, the digital humanities was defined by Mark Sample as something worth sharing – not building. Sample’s article started with comparing and contrasting the two points of views (which were previously mentioned). Afterwards, it went more into depth about how this field is produced and reproduced. Typically a person expands on the work of one person in order to further develop the algorithm and the field. As for Lisa Spiro article, “‘This is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities,” it is the job of scholars within the field of digital humanities to initiate critical dialogue on the sharing of ideas within the field of digital humanities. Ultimately this answers the questions “Why the Digital Humanities?”. If we do not take the ideas of other influential people and expand on them we will never be able to improve on the algorithmic culture we live in. As a result we will be stuck in situations where we are faced with boring Netflix reflections. But more importantly, we will not be able to improve on society as a whole.

Shane-Justin Nu’uhiwa

Is there an actual definition of the Digital Humanities? (9/7)

There isn’t really a concrete definition for Digital Humanities, but there multitudes of values attached to the phrase. When I think of Digital Humanities, I think of an abundance of technology used to help humans or society in general. Whether it be asking “Siri” to look up a question, Googling the answer to a problem, or using a GPS to navigate a location, technology is highly utilized in order to make life easier for humans.  In class, we spoke of algorithmic culture which is apart of the Digital Humanities. The algorithmic culture includes such things as receiving advertisements tailored to your interests or or having Netflix generate a section based on shows you watch. While I can’t disagree that it is helpful, I believe certain things make us dependent on technology. For example, college students now are more dependent than ever on using the internet to research items when instead they could walk down to the library and open a book. My hope would be that certain things that are easy to manually do aren’t over taken by technology and humans eventually forget how to do it themselves.

The two articles that we read had slightly different viewpoints on what the Digital Humanities are but both had the same overall concept.  The first article, “The Digital Humanities is not about Building it’s about Sharing” by Mark Sample stayed close to its title. Sample believed the in Digital Humanities, knowledge is not produced but instead is shared and reproduced. According to Sample, the Digital Humanities gives us endless possibilities since we are no longer bound to physical material such as books but now we have a whole other world at our hands. On the other hand, Lisa Spiro speaks of Digital Humanities as more of a community that needs to produce values. Similar to Mark Sample, Lisa believes that Digital Humanities should foster   conversation and knowledge. A quote from Spiro that I thought was interesting was, “Grounded in humanistic values but catalyzed by Internet values, the digital humanities seeks to push the humanities into new territory by promoting collaboration, openness, and experimentation.” I feel like this quote is the closest to summing up what Digital Humanities really is. Why Digital Humanities? Because we now have the power of technology at our hands to open new doors and together as a humanistic society, explore endless possibilities and opportunities. Some may argue that it is dangerous, while others may argue that it is necessary.

-Jillian S.

 dolum.illo

Picture Citation:

Dolom, Ram. “Students Should Embrace UCLA’s New Digital Humanities Minor.” Daily Bruin. Web. 7 Sept. 2015.

So What’s Up with the Digital Humanities, Anyway?

In the wake of the two readings we’ve been given for Tuesday, the biggest conclusion about the Digital Humanities (DH) I can draw is that no one can seem to agree on what it is. I imagine all these different people and organizations involved with the DH as chickens running around squawking and pecking at each other. And no doubt it would only be worse if they were all stuffed into one chicken coop together. These people must be a lot of fun at parties, right?

But I digress with my poultry analogy. If I were to give some kind of definition of the DH myself, it would be along the lines of, “people involved in Humanities work that either use digital media to examine texts, art, etc, or contribute to the Humanities through digital media.” It seems the happy medium of the DH would be to bring together the “hack vs. yack” sides, as Mark Sample puts it in “The Digital Humanities is Not about Building, it’s about Sharing”. Because truthfully, the DH involves both theory and practice, just as regular Humanities studies do. We’ve been doing both in class – examining texts with tools like Voyant, and then discussing our theories about them in our blog posts, for instance. Those who pick apart historical documents using computers and technology are just as much Digital Humanists as those who write their own essays and journals online. Frankly it baffles me why many scholars haven’t seemed to realize that yet. Why can’t we all just get along, guys?

In light of this, I think the question of why the DH, as opposed to what they are, is much easier to answer. Lisa Spiro essentially spells this out for us (in a rather repetitive way, I might add, but we’ll ignore that). Her lengthy discussion about a potential value statement for the DH is precisely why this shiny branch of the Humanities exists. She puts particular emphasis on “openness” and “collaboration” throughout her essay, which I think gets right at the heart of the matter. The DH provides a medium for sharing insight, findings, creative work, and a whole truckload of other information about the Humanities that hadn’t been available before the kind of technology we have today. Humanists can share with each other across global divisions in a matter of seconds when they work digitally, and that allows for nearly everyone to have their work seen and discussed, rather than isolating people to a small ring of local chitchat. It connects everyone who dabbles in the Humanities, and provides a means for us all to work together.

Spiro also mentions how diverse the DH are, at least in terms of things like occupation, education, gender, etc. (She does mention the DH are not as racially diverse as they could be, but that’s an issue for another time that needs to be worked on.) The diversity that the DH does have as of now is another essential expansion on what is normally referred to as just the Humanities. Bringing all these different kinds of people together through the digital world allows for input on Humanities subjects from varied viewpoints, rather than just from specific scholars who publish their work in written journals. Spiro brings up social media like Twitter in her essay, and how that brings about the chance for basically anyone to join a discussion about the Humanities. Though that may not always be a good thing, depending on who you ask, I do think it’s important to allow for that kind of broad contribution to the Humanities, something else that wouldn’t exist without the digital realm.

So in the long and the short of it, the Digital Humanities is an evolution of sorts for the Humanities. It’s moving Humanities work to a technological sphere, one that provides that “openness” and “collaboration” Spiro was so fond of rehashing. And to me, that’s a fantastic step forward for the Humanities as a whole. Because let’s be real, without it, Humanists would most likely be holed up in their own little thinking caves writing down their discoveries on pieces of paper. While the being holed up part might still be true, at least if there’s a computer involved, one wouldn’t be so entirely alone.

Voyant in Researching Philosophy and Legal Files

Group members: a_colombo, k_elliott3, a_rocha3, Kyle C, p_drake

Our given website to examine was a philosophical collection of sorts. The site’s author, Kieran Healy, had complied a smorgasbord of citations into one giant, graphical web, all references to philosophy journals and articles written by people who most likely knew what they were talking about better than we understood it. From what we gathered, the research question most likely being focused on was simply an effort to discover what kinds of things the philosophical community was chitchatting about, and who was doing the chitchatting. Hence, the website was geared toward an audience whose heads were much higher up in the philosophical clouds than ours. Upon dropping the website URL into Voyant, it became obvious that Healy was primarily focused on one thing in his writing: the graph he’d made, as demonstrated by the word cloud below.

philosophy word cloud thing

Apart from admiring all the colorful dots and crisscrossed lines of Healy’s graph, there wasn’t much for us to glean from the website, so we started branching our discussion off into other areas of study that Voyant might be useful for. We focused particularly on researching legal cases, and how Voyant would make it exceptionally easy to sort through legal files, precedents, and other related documents to find correlations between cases. If we wanted to compare different cases of domestic abuse, for example, we would simply have to plop a handful of files into Voyant to find the ones that would help us the most. So if anyone ever needs to write a research paper about legal proceedings, perhaps Voyant is a good place for you to start.

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

Harry Potter Research Questions Group Post

In class group post by Luke, Shane, Leslie, Danielle, and Jillian.

Our assigned website was https://deatheaterstudies.wordpress.com/ which featured different blog posts about Harry Potter. Each section had a different research question; for our voyant use, we decided to put in two blog posts, one asking why there were so many  members of Slytherin and the other focusing on the differences of socioeconomic class within the books of Harry Potter. Our goal was to compare these two questions and to see how far the scope of the author’s research extended.

Harry Potter Death Eaters Cirrus Harry Potter Death Eaters Bubblelines

 

As you can see, there are many words that appear that are not in the regular English language that only appear in the Harry Potter world. We can tell that the author is definitely knowledgeable about Harry Potter. If you are looking at this from an outside perspective as someone who has  never read Harry Potter before, it would most likely make no sense. The bigger research question could be relating death eaters back to various aspects of the Harry Potter Universe.

Group Alpha Force Awesome

The research method used in “Papers Of the Past” combined an empirical study with analysis of extraneous factors for the nations oldest newspapers. This methodology of using a combination of the empirical and theory based research would serve especially well when looking at the influence of public policy. One such example would be to look at the views held over a pipeline being built between Northern California and Southern California. A research question that could be posed is who is in support of the pipeline would be popular support within the state. Looking at data from newspapers such as the LA times and San Francisco chronicle, the differences in language shows a clear difference in who is in support of the project.

Now obviously to get an appropriate data a multitude of newspapers would have to be entered, but the differences in opinion based upon location indicate that the research method used from “Papers Of the Past” would serve to reach a more definite answer to the question.

 

-Brandon, Ashley, Dylan, and Jaime

The danger of the Voyant tool

Using this software I was able to sort through data and able to highlight key words. The benefit of which obviously comes from the ability to analyze patterns in text, and thus form certain hypothesis. However, there is an implicit danger in seeing correlations or lack there of within writing, as it could lead to a faulty hypothesis. As correlation does not imply causation, the use of the voyant tool as a means to find an explicit relation is obviously flawed as it takes the text entered out of context.

That being said the tool is still a very helpful tool. It allows for the sorting of data without a lot of work, and can highlight texts which could in theory have some relation. For that the tool is incredibly helpful. Though again it is important to note the tool can only do what it is asked and programmed to do, which is a essentially a text finder. Any relations found must be analyzed by an individual in order to ensure an optimal result.

Voyant: Analyzing Text

Word Cloud Voyant

 

Going into the process of using Voyant as an analytical tool, I felt pretty confident. As soon as we began to use the tool, my mind was baffled. Voyant began to confuse me with all the different buttons, searches, highlights, and so forth. The more I began to use it, the more I started to learn a bit about it. Voyant was a program that I have never heard about before, so I did not know what to expect when going into using it. I chose to use the “test corpus” as my text of choice. After uploading it into Voyant, I could not make out what type of text it was. I then took out the stop words from the text, and it began to seem more clear. Words that came up quite often, were “God,” and “Christ.” So based upon these words, I began to view it as a religious text. This was pretty much the biggest takeaway I could get from the text. My Voyant skills have not gotten superb yet, so I’m still in the midst of bettering them.

Overall, I would say that I have at least gotten a little bit of insight into how Voyant is used. Just by going through it a few times and playing with the different tools, I have gotten better. I still have a bunch of questions about the program, but I’m sure that I will be able to figure them out as the class goes on.

-Ray Baig

Voyant: The Text Tool

Going into the process of using Voyant as an analytical tool, I felt pretty confident. As soon as we began to use the tool, my mind was baffled. Voyant began to confuse me with all the different buttons, searches, highlights, and so forth. The more I began to use it, the more I started to learn a bit about it. Voyant was a program that I have never heard about before, so I did not know what to expect when going into using it. I chose to use the “test corpus” as my text of choice. After uploading it into Voyant, I could not make out what type of text it was. I then took out the stop words from the text, and it began to seem more clear. Words that came up quite often, were “God,” and “Christ.” So based upon these words, I began to view it as a religious text. This was pretty much the biggest takeaway I could get from the text. My Voyant skills have not gotten superb yet, so I’m still in the midst of bettering them.

Overall, I would say that I have at least gotten a little bit of insight into how Voyant is used. Just by going through it a few times and playing with the different tools, I have gotten better. I still have a bunch of questions about the program, but I’m sure that I will be able to figure them out as the class goes on.

-Ray Baig

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

Voyant on Dataset #2

Voyant is a particularly interesting tool to use to help a person with dissecting various writings. As the assignment was to use it on a dataset, I used Voyant to examine dataset #2.

The first thing I did was to apply the word filter, English (Taporware) to the documents. After filtering out commonly used words, I found “said” to be the most popular word used throughout the documents. “Said” is frequently used in fictional novels, denoting spoken words from a character. Thus, it can be inferred that dataset #2 most likely tells a story of some sort. This is further confirmed by the following most recurring words, “God” and “Christ.” Those words additionally hint that the dataset potentially contains scriptures.

After learning about the subject of the documents, I continued to analyze popular recurring words using the word cloud. “Judgement” and “martyrdom” popped up, as did “tyrant” and “emperor.” The combination of words suggests that the scriptures have a common theme of facing torture and tribulations from a person in power (lord, emperor, etc.) and choosing to follow God’s teaching rather than to submit. Essentially, the theme is martyrdom.

Word Cloud Voyant

Following my analysis of the subject and theme, I turned to word patterns to further my analysis. I wasn’t surprised to find that “judge”, “death”, “tortures”, and “life” were commonly seen together. However, I was surprised to find that “martyrdom” and “death” were not frequently seen together, as martyrdom nearly always means a certain death. Of this, I won’t be able to understand perhaps unless I read the actual documents.

Word Comparison VoyantWord Comparison Voyant 2

In the end, using Voyant to analyze text was an interesting experience. It can certainly help in ascertaining which author wrote which pieces and how the author writes stylistically. However, aside from those niche functions, Voyant does not have many other uses. Perhaps when applied to the internet, it can help filter websites. But when it is used by itself to discern what the theme or subject of a text is about, it would be more prudent to scan the various documents. Key words and frequency of use only go so far. There is a lot of guesswork and analysis in doing that in comparison to doing some light reading. Additionally, using it to discern the location of certain words is also somewhat pointless, as “control f” works as well as Voyant to locate said words. It also does so without having to filter the whole passage or page into a program that takes minutes to reveal text information.

Aside from the usefulness of the program intrinsically, Voyant may cause problems for those going to school in terms of learning how to research. Of research, Voyant may oversimplify research to the point where students won’t understand how to research in the future. Alternatively, students may rely on the program such that they miss pivotal information that may help them in their research – side information that adds to the quality of their work. If most students worked on the same topic, they all may retrieve the same information due to the use of Voyant, thus relegating the point of research moot.

Voyant

I believe that Voyant is a great way to simultaneously analyse multiple documents about the same subject. When looking over academic journals for a research paper instead of skimming though every journal one by one for certain words or phrases, Voyant simplifies the process and saves time. The “keywords in context” would be the most helpful when trying to find certain phrases for your research. Also narrowing the search down with the “words in documents” tab can make your research much more efficient and organized. There are some problems that could come up, such as not being able to find all of your research materials online for Voyant to process, or Voyant itself just not loading. I ran into the later when trying to upload a picture of word trends. The main thing I took away from Voyant was the ability to collect written material and sort and search the material in a timely manner. Also knowing that all the material was thoroughly looked through and you are not missing any instance of when you searched for. I believe that this is a way of reducing human error and I really like the concept.

Shakespeare’s Works on Voyant

Voyant is an interesting website that enables scholars to analyze themes of novels. It is a caring software that helps people to save a significant amount of time in understanding the main ideas of digital texts. I remember that we used to have to read and annotate to comprehend books. Voyant helps highlight the most important concepts for readers in books. I tested Shakespeare’s novels on Voyant to experience several features. The most frequent word is shall which appears over two thousand times. I also selected few words to see whether they have correlation in Shakespeare’s novels. The words lord, death and world all have a high correlation in Hamlet which enables scholars to compare the themes of Shakespeare’s novels all at once.

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The feature that I found most interesting on Voyant is the word cloud. I think it helps a lot to know many of key words in novels that I am interested to read.

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Voyant Tools

At first I was very intrigued by the program, I had never heard or seen anything quite like it before. At first the tool was very confusing and it didn’t make much sense to me, but as I used it and got more familiar I really enjoyed it and it was interesting. I thought the aspect of being able to view similarities in different texts was very fascinating, but as I used it more and more I decided that I would never really use this or need to use this tool in my daily life. Even though this is a new idea and innovation that I see being used for a research project, I wouldn’t need to use this in my daily life. In terms of using it as a research assistant, I like that you could analyze the text and other sources before deciding whether to use them or not. I also remember in class the professor saying that there are other versions of Voyant tools that are more sophisticated, and I think that would be a better tool to use in other aspects of our lives besides doing research. I did like the aspect of being able to learn the tool very fast and efficiently. I really liked this quality of the tool and if I ever did need it I would feel comfortable using it.

It is fair to say that we have all likely written our fair share of research papers throughout both our high school and college careers. One of the challenges of writing a research paper often can be finding sources that meet the requirements for the needed quality of the source, as well as the obvious need for the source to contain the relevant information that you are actually looking for, and also that the information that you find in the source fits the tone of your paper. The ability to recruit a computer program to read the source, and subsequently decipher if it contains this relevant information without actually physically reading the source yourself, can be an extremely valuable method to save time, and reduce frustration, when it comes to writing these papers. This is where Voyant comes in, a computer program that you can use to “read” the material for you and then filter the material using keywords to determine if the source will or will not work for what you are looking for.

To use an example using the text we were provided, if one wanted to write a research paper pertaining to sermons where Lincoln was mentioned, and you happened to have a large source of digital transcripts of these sermons, you could in essence have the program read all of these sermons for you. The benefit to this would be the ability filter out individual sermons, or individual lines in the sermons, which contained information that you were looking for, without having to read hundreds of thousands of words yourself, undoubtedly saving you an immense amount of time and frustration. For example, if you wanted to see the data on how many times the word “justice” appeared in the sermons, the program could give you a detailed breakdown on how many times the word appeared in each work, and which works it appeared most frequently in.

chart

 

Using this chart above, it is clear that if you were looking for a sermon where the word “justice” was used, you would obviously know where and where not to start when you were looking for relevant information on the topic based on the spikes in the graph above.

I think that personally I would use Voyant in the future for a research paper for one key reason. That reason being that many of the sources I tend to use are digital sources, which I believe, thanks to the scope of the internet, likely all of us rely on today. The ability to quickly paste URLs or text into the Voyant box and determine the usefulness of a few sources at a time without fully reading them beforehand would be something that I know would save me a lot of time when it comes to evaluating if I can, or want to, use a particular source in my paper. In closing, I believe that Voyant can be a valuable research assistant, as long as you have a clear understanding of what you are looking for in a particular document.

Voyant, Shakespeare, and the Benefits of Digital Technology

I’m an English Major and on many occasions I have had to read many classic works of literature and I have had to analyze and compare different texts. I have a process that I follow when I write essays, and I am sure many other students follow the same steps:

  1. I read the text.
  2. I highlight specific passages that make an interesting point or that I will want to find in the future.
  3. I figure out what I want to write about.
  4. I look through the text again, searching for passages that support my thesis.
  5. Write my paper.

That all probably sounds pretty familiar. Almost everyone who has had to write a paper follows that process, or at least something similar.

However, in this age of technology and algorithms, there are new applications and tools make it easier to look through texts and show readers things about classic works that they have never seen before. Voyant is a tool that does exactly that. Voyant can take dozens of documents, analyze them, and produce graphs and charts about the use of language and words in those documents and compare their usage.

By putting 23 Shakespeare plays into Voyant, the tool can tell me that “SHALL” is the most common word in throughout those plays. Voyant can also tells me that Hamlet is the longest text of the 23 documents with 34,183 words and that Comedy of Errors is the shortest with 18,080 words.

Do you want more? OK. Othello is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. If you have not read it I suggest you do, it is a beautiful tragedy. If I am writing a paper about Othello, I will probably write about the love between Othello and Desdemona, the hate Iago has for Othello, and all of the death and murder that occurs in the play. With Voyant, I can see how often the words “LOVE”, “HATE”, and “DEATH” occur in the text, as well as how frequent they appear throughout the play.

Voyant.Othello.Chart002

As you can see, “LOVE” and “DEATH” are not mentioned in the beginning but the word “HATE” is there. In fact, “LOVE” is not mentioned at all but the word “DEATH” becomes really common in the end. I think that this information is interesting because it says something about the relationship between the characters and it also says something about the mood. There is a lack of love and death is a specter that hangs over the play.

Voyant can do so much more, and there are probably other programs that can do even more than Voyant. I think that Voyant and similar applications, show that digital technology and algorithms have a benefit to humanists who want to examine classic works in way that is faster and perhaps more efficient than spending hours or days, reading and carefully examining each line of text.

Voyant ft. Test-Corpus-2

test-corpus-2

 

 

Voyant was not easy to use at first, but it soon made perfect sense. I thought it was immensely interesting to see how it could break down the texts and not only extract individual words, but also showcase detailed graphs and more.

Although some people think Voyant is unnecessary, I think it’s a pretty cool program to have. I believe it actually can help us understand a text more. For instance, seeing which words appear the most can help us understand the author’s thought process and emphasis on certain ideas. In addition, it can display certain words (ex. life and death) to demonstrate contrasting elements in the story. Even if people do not use it for these purposes or deem the program useless, the aesthetics of Voyant stand out regardless of its contribution to our understanding of various works.

Voyant-Challenged

Let me start off by saying that I am not a very technology-savvy. When I first opened voyant, I was overwhelmed by the layout, graphs, and tools. After a few tutorials and watching Dr. S, I somewhat got the hang of it and realized that it is a very unique and interesting tool. I have never heard of it before and I have mixed feelings on its usefulness.

I decided to upload the test corpus into voyant at home since I had already tried the other two in class.  I wanted to see if I could figure out what the text was about by using voyant. After eliminating stop words from the word cloud, I was left with unique words such as “God”, “judge” “Christ” “Habib” “tyrant” and “governor” . By these highly used words alone, I was able to gather that this is some sort of religious text, or at least involves religion in some way. The word “tyrant” is is more of a dated word so I can assume that this is an older text.

However, one of my issues with voyant is that, for example, just because “tyrant” is a dated word, it doesn’t mean that the text is dated. The word could be used in a different context or have a totally different meaning all together and there wouldn’t be a way that I would know just by looking at statistics.

All and all, voyant is interesting tool for the advanced, but it can not go into the depth of a text and break it down that far.

 

–Jillian S.

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Voyant: Words in the Clouds (September 3rd)

Voyant is an interesting piece of software, that technically speaking, works very poorly as a web based tool. I find its uses and applications interesting and vast, yet the volume of data that it is processing is so large, that when I found myself playing with particular tools, specifically the “sunburst” tool, it would cause my internet browser to stop responding and I’d have to start the whole process anew. Relating this back to modularity, the reason I would find this more useful as a downloadable standalone application is because, in my experience, web based tools are far more susceptible to program failures such as I experienced with Voyant, and locally hosted applications don’t react in such a “if I’m going down I’m taking you with me” sort of manner. Having an external failure of one program that doesn’t take everything else I’m doing across my emails, this blog post, and my research down with it leads to lessened frustration in the end user, for example if Voyant crashed and I had to restart my entire computer every time it did, I would lose efficiency and be more frustrated. Additionally, all of the tools would function without the use of plug-ins, for example, I was unable to get “lava” or “mandala” to work because I was missing some unspecified web plug-in (the picture looked like I was missing something from Adobe Flash, but looking at my available in-browser plug-ins I’m not missing anything crucial and I don’t expect Voyant to be using pointedly specific plug-ins without telling the user what they are.


 

Alt text is cool right?

I would frame this and put it on my wall. Maybe give a poster of it to a favorite high school Lit teacher.

Now moving on to why Voy-aunt (which doesn’t rhyme with buoyant, but savant) is a particularly interesting tool to utilize in humanities research. I used the Shakespeare texts, and I found myself playing with the visual aspects of the program, such as “bubblelines” which visualizes the words you input in a very nice almost artwork fashion. What caught my eye using this tool was how out of the words “good” “shall” “lord” “come” “sir” and “love”, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors only uses the word “sir” throughout it’s text, which sets it apart as the singular, though still visually appealing, monochromatic line among a series of more psychedelic ones.

 

Next I used the “knots” tool, which unlike “bubblelines” or “cirrus” gave me no usable information, and the ability to change the “angles” and “tangles” with no relevant correspondence to the data makes this tool seem very questionable.

Okay fine, my artwork at 12.

My artwork as a 6-year old, or classic Microsoft screensaver?

And when I was clicking around in it, this message popped up: raising more than a few questions while actually providing me with more interesting subject matter than what the tool generated.

Why is "good" bold?

Who is this for? Why is it here? Why is my only option to say “OK” after it rants to me?

Some practical applications to this software would be comparing two translations of a text (lets say Shakespeare again) to compare exactly how the wording changes between the slight variations in text. Or we could take, say, the First Folio and run it against Folgers modern translations to see how the language has or has not changed over time and how similar or completely different what we’re reading now is compared to the original texts. You could do the same with various translations of the bible and compare word clouds to see if one favors particular words over other synonyms and why that is. A short comment on the word clouds, looking through the media library (sharing this blog means sharing the libraries too if you noticed), I see how the cloud generated different shapes, patterns, and colors for the same data (credit for below clouds goes to whomever uploaded them).

downloadThe dataset provided in Figure 1 is provided from the Test Corpus 2 files.word cloud Screen Shot 2015-09-02 at 12.54.24 PM Cirrus

Five different visualizations of word clouds or “Cirrus” for Dr. S’s test corpus.


A brief note on the shared media library: it is interesting to see what data is associated with each word cloud, such as file name. The diversity in the naming across these five clouds is more than I would expect.


Returning my post back to practical applications of Voyant, I think it can be used for many purposes other than finding commonalities within a corpus, though the visualizations seem to be most grand when they are accessing a large body of work. I could see myself using Voyant in many “this wasn’t made to do that but okay, I guess it works” kind of ways such as:

  • Running a personal journal through Voyant and analyzing the recurring themes, people, and places mentioned in the text to better understand how I got to where I am today.
  • Running the data of a series of lists, such as the lyrics to the Billboard Top 40 songs of any given day to see a visual representation of what words to you would probably hear if you turned your radio on. Another example would be using a list of ingredients for each menu item of a restaurant to see what their most used item is and use that information to gain insight to how they may make their recipes.
  • Analyzing the code of a program through Voyant to see how often a certain function is used.

If Voyant was slightly more powerful and could search short key phrases (Name Surname, places that aren’t one word like Los Angeles or New York, or just common word combinations or descriptors like chocolate milk or tired student) I think it would become exponentially more useful. I do not believe that the program accounts for aspects of the upload that are not actually “part” of the text, such as the Project Gutenberg disclaimers at the start of each text in the Shakespeare upload. Since it leaves that information, it skews the data slightly past what you are actually analyzing, and a system that allowed you to choose which parts of the document upload functions as text to analyze and which functions as non academic information would be something that takes Voyant one step further. Additionally, if it was able to count pluralizations and their singular forms as one set of data used (at least have a setting to inclusively count both as one countable object), this tool would be able to offer better analysis of comparing two subjects that may be missing information because it’s reading and comparing “love vs. hate” as opposed to “love/s vs. hate/s”.

Now as I round out this blog post, I would like to offer up a Cirrus of my own and some other analytics that I made to visualize all of the blog posts posted so far (including this one up to this point in the text) and how frequently some words are used.

This is us. We sure like talking about Voyant huh? Many words are repeated alongside their plurals too.

Collectively, we used a total of 1,267 unique words, said “Voyant” a total of 75 times, “Cirrus” a total of 7 times, and “fun” a total of 3. Though two of those were from one person, so they really liked using Voyant. To the one person who posted their blog while I was making and analyzing the above Cirrus, I’m sorry I couldn’t include you! Adding text to the corpus reader after initializing the program now suddenly seems like a useful feature too.

-Luke

Voyant

As we looked at Voyant in class and now at home this is a very interesting tool. This is something I have never heard or seen before in my years on this earth.  I am very impressed by this tool. As we saw in class it will counts all the words in a text or even a series of books as we saw with the Shakespeare download and gives us a Word cloud and many other useful tools. In the word cloud the words that are used the most are represented by larger images of the words. It allows us to filter word from the text so we can specifically see at certain words or groups of words.download

 

By clicking on a word we can see graphs of statistically information as we seen in all the Shakespeare file. As demonstrated by our Professor with word love. I chose the word “Thou” and have inserted the graph showing the results.chart

 

This tool I would guess would allow us to do many different possibilities when we are doing research to break down a text in a different way. It allow students a teacher, anyone doing research to see how many times a word appears in a text, we can also by selecting a word click on any text and see the passage where appears. Which will help a person to analyze maybe how the word is being used in a sentence or paragraph. In my scholastic endeavor I am not sure how I will use this other than maybe for our class. It will be fun to play with it.

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 most 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

Voyant’s Analysis on Lincoln

When first using Voyant, I thought that it had an interesting and unique way in analyzing a variety of texts that helps readers understand more about specific readings.  In trying to get used to this new software, I selected one of the downloads from Tuesday’s class, which was a sermon about Abraham Lincoln’s death by Warren Hathaway, to experiment with on Voyant.  Before I started using this document, I assumed that it would mainly be about the life and time of Abraham Lincoln.  In order to figure out the concept of the text, I decided to look up key words like “nation,” “god,” and “death” that would relate to Abraham Lincoln and his life.

As seen from the chart above, the word, “nation,” (blue line) had the most frequencies with “god” (green line) coming in at second place.  It seemed like “death” (pink line) was not as common as the previous two, even though the main idea of this document was about Lincoln’s death, it did not mean that it was going to talk about it the whole time.  In the reading, it referred to Lincoln as an inspiring leader who was taken away so soon and how they will never forget the grateful deeds that he has done for the country.

In conclusion, Voyant has been helpful in interpreting texts that are unfamiliar to the reader.  If someone ever gets confused about a specific reading, they can use this digital network to assist them in understanding its context.

 

Technology, Voyant, and Digital Humanities: Frankly, It’s a Working Relationship

The dataset provided in Figure 1 is provided from the Test Corpus 2 files.

The dataset provided in Figure 1 is provided from the Test Corpus 2 files.

Uploading the Test Corpus 2 dataset provided to us onto Voyant, I feel as if the word cloud tells a story of its own. For instance, words like Godcommand, and martyrdom (as seen in Figure 1) provides biblical references to the Old Testament. Imagery of God fearing people are painted in mind – this is reinforced with words like judgetortures, and sacrifice.

However, focusing on the summary component on Voyant, I realize locations like Palestine plays an influential role with the text. Also, in Maccabees, for example, one can conclude the story focuses on a tyrant with strict laws who is harsh towards women and children. This is because tyrant is used at least 44 times, law 38, women 34, and children 31.

Figure 2

The dataset provided in Figure 2 is provided from the Test Corpus 2 files.

Upon clicking on tyrant in the summary component, I am shown the frequency for the aforementioned word. In segment five of the document, the word was used the most – segment seven was when the word was used the least.

After using this assignment to get familiarized with the program, I stand by what I said the first day of class – for me, “it’s a working relationship” when it comes to technology. I admit I am not the most “tech savvy” person and I had difficulties using this software. I have a feeling that Digital Humanities may be a difficult course because of my incompetencies with technology; however, I will also admit that the program was beneficial. Voyant made me realize the power of words and how we are able to distinguish certain writers. I honestly cannot wait to fully comprehend this program (and learn how to successfully manage a blog) throughout the course of the semester.

The Uses of Voyant

During Tuesday’s class session we were all introduced to a new tool known as Voyant. Voyant can be accessed online or can be downloaded to your computer, desk top, etc. At first I did not completely understand how Voyant worked or what it was used for but after the class was instructed on what to do it became more clear to me that voyant is used for multiple things but mainly for word count and comparing different words. Once you download a document onto your computer and upload it onto voyant, it will reveal how many times a certain word is used. This can be helpful since it will give you an idea of what to expect and whether or not the document is useful. For example, the documents Dr. S gave us to upload onto voyant showed the word “God” many times which can give the reader the clues that the document could have a lot to do with the subject of religion.

Voyant is basically used for digital texts for analysis and to study texts. At first Voyant did not seem to be that helpful to me just because I myself am not familiar at all with digital texts but I am sure if I were to use digital texts it would most definitely come in handy for analysis and studying. I am sure we will be using many digital texts in this class so it will help more once we start to actually get the hang of it as we go. Other than that, I find voyant to be a really cool tool that all of us in the class will utilize.

 

Utilizing Voyant in the Digital Humanities

 

Voyant is an extremely useful and clever tool to use in the digital humanities… especially when you’re looking at vocabulary. However, when looking at something other than vocabulary and word frequencies within the content, it’s pretty much useless.

When first entering Voyant, there’s a colorful word cloud that visually depicts how often a word will appear within the dataset, and one can remove the more common words like “the” or “and” by going to the “Stopwords” options. Then the more interesting words, the words that are more able to show the point of the content, appear.

Screen Shot 2015-09-02 at 12.54.24 PMClearly, these words are much more interesting than “the” and “and”. Not to say those words are unimportant or anything, but, well… you get the point. Looking at the word cloud as a whole, it seems like the content of the dataset is really interesting, I mean, look at all those cool words: “death,” “tortures,” “shall,” “martyrdom”, et cetera, et cetera. This obviously implies that the content is a lot more complex than “and” or “the” would entail.

 

 

 

Moving on from the word cloud (difficult, right? There’s so many pretty colors), one can see that there are a lot more tools that can be utilized in examining the vocabulary content of the dataset. The summary shows how many documents are in the dataset, the longest and shortest of those documents, the highest vocabulary densities in the whole set, and the frequencies of the words. The corpus reader, just to the right of the word cloud and summary, shows the content of the dataset in its natural form, along with certain words that you can select to be highlighted.

Now, possibly the neatestScreen Shot 2015-09-02 at 12.54.50 PM thing about Voyant is the”Words in the Entire Corpus” tool, as it shows you the most common word frequencies (which can also be filtered by using the “stopwords” option), and allows you to compare certain word frequencies throughout the dataset.

Here, I compared the words “men” and “beasts”, just because they seem pretty opposite in definition, and it’d be neat to see how many times they’re used in the same document. What I found was that, there was always a notable difference in the word frequencies of each document (besides 10)scilitan and 12)readme, in which both words do not appear at all). While “men” would be used multiple times within a document, “beasts” would appear quite infrequently, if at all, and if “beasts” was used generously in the document, “men” would seldom appear.

Interesting, right? It kind of makes you wonder what these words were being used for. And that’s exactly the problem with Voyant.

 

It’s undeniable that Voyant has its uses, but it doesn’t quite have a knack for finding the context in which a word will appear, without searching through the whole “Corpus Reader” tool to find it. You just don’t know if, in the documents provided, men are being called beasts instead of men, or if they really are alluding to men. Sure, the Corpus Reader can help with that, but it can be pretty tedious to have to search through the whole thing for two words that repeat over one hundred times to see how they are used in context. So it really does seem like you would have to read just to see how a word is used instead of clicking on the nice, pretty words provided in the “Cirrus” tool to find out just what the texts are about.

Experimenting with Voyant – A Study in Word Counts and Pretty Colors

Upon dropping the “test corpus” file into the Voyant system, I found myself embarking on a journey into the inner workings of vocabulary quite unlike one I have ever taken before. For one, Voyant makes words much more colorful than the text in a book might, so that was understandably exciting. My fondness for aesthetics aside, Voyant proved to be quite the useful tool for unraveling word usage and trends in documents, especially ones I myself am unfamiliar with.word cloud

The first thing I was drawn to was the word cloud – or more specifically, the word “said” in that jumble of colorful letters. (This was
after filtering the cloud, of course, because let’s be honest, nobody wants to count how many times the word “and” is used in a document. That would be as tedious as counting how many times the average teenager says “like” in one conversation.) Looking at “said”, obviously we can tell there’s a lot of talking in these documents. 312 instances of it, to be exact. But that doesn’t tell us much otherwise, unless we compare “said” with some of the other words that crop up frequently.

This brings me to the other batch of lovely colors Voyant has to offer – the graphs of word trends. Upon clicking on “said” in the word cloud, Voyant generated a chart for me that detailed how often “said” appeared in each of the “test corpus” documents. It cropped up the most in the document titled “scillitan”, and the second most in “justin-et-al.” This doesn’t tell me much as someone unfamiliar with the context of these texts, so in order to enlighten myself, I compared “said” with another word, “god.”

god vs said chartWhen I politely asked Voyant to show me the frequencies of both words, it generated the graph at the left. Though the trends in “said” and “god” don’t entirely match up, “god” seems to peak in both “scillitan” and “justin-et-al,” matching the peaks of the word “said.” Clearly this, along with the word cloud, points toward the documents being of religious origin. I think it’s also safe to infer that the texts where “said” and “god” appear together most often involve some kind of religious speeches. Upon examining some other common words in the corpus list, such as “death,” “tortures,” and most obviously “martyrdom,” I can conclude that the people most likely giving those speeches were martyrs, perhaps at the ends of their lives, perhaps trying to inspire the people of the faith they were dying for.

Overall, my venture into Voyant’s database gave me a bit of context for the “test corpus” documents where I had none previously, and it granted me a peek at how certain words and vocabulary come into play within the texts, giving them their due emphasis. However, beyond that, it didn’t really teach me how those words were used in their specific contexts, which could be problematic if I were researching these documents. I would still have to read the documents themselves to understand how those words came into play, who said them and for what purpose, and all that fun jazz. So essentially, Voyant is useful for getting a basic overview of a document, and deciding whether that document would be beneficial to read, but apart from that, it doesn’t give much to go off of as far as content. Regardless, I can’t say it’s not fun to play with.

Shakespeare—Voyant discoveries

Voyant allowed me to kind of discover what themes or what aspects were more prominent in a specific story versus several others. For example, when we used Voyant in regards to Shakespeare. It was the most fascinating when we took the example of narrowing the search down to “love” the amount of times that the word came up most, compared to other pieces from Shakespeare was in The Merchant of Venice. This was actually the most shocking because I really assumed that Romeo and Juliet would be number one in regards to the most times the word “love” appeared.
Aside from finding it shocking, I realized that maybe narrowing the search to just Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice I would be able to identify where in the plays the words peaked at the most in terms of identifying why The Merchant of Venice had more versus Romeo and Juliet. Narrowing my search was probably the most useful tool because I was not very familiar with the Merchant of Venice play compared to Romeo and Juliet. Right away, after looking at the results from the two I noticed that, for example in Romeo and Juliet although the theme of “love” is very apparent to us as readers, it does not necessarily mean that the word itself is going to show up in the play as often.
Overall Voyant is very helpful and can tell you about common words and even common concepts re-occurring throughout a piece of work. I learned that it’s better to compare two to three pieces but always start with one and identify the work in that single piece first so it’s easier.

—The graph below compares both plays, The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet. You can tell that they both have peak moments but not around the same time within the play. Romeo and Juliet’s peak moment is towards the middle and end of the play compared to The Merchant of Venice where it’s towards the beginning middle of the play.

Data Mining: Martyrs (Sept 1)

After “revealing” the contents behind the Test Corpus dataset on Voyant, my eyes are immediately drawn to the cirrus.

Cirrus

Clearly, the most frequent word used in the corpus is said (312 times). Following, God (180), Christ (115), Time (105), Death (98), and Governor (95) are also prevalent, while words such as word (7), sacrifice(9), and endure(9) are small and not frequently included in the texts. Solely judging from the word bubble, one can determine that the texts are religious.

 

 

Word Trend_Said

Clicking said causes a Word Trend graph to appear. Specifically, the word said is most frequently used in “Scillitan.” Being Catholic, I recognize this as a reference to the Scillitan Martyrs. Simultaneously, this sheds light as to why said is the most used word throughout the dataset; martyrs translates to witnesses, and witnesses are always speaking.

Life vs. Death Word Trend

 

Playing with word trends, I plotted life and death against each other. Almost always, death is written more than life– with the exception of texts “Lyons-Vienne” and “Polycarp.” Looking further, In “Lyons-Vienne,” life is once used in this context:

“‘…being well pleased even to lay down his life in defense of the brethren. For he was and is a true disciple of Christ…’ Relevation 14:4″

Although life is used more frequently than death in this text, it is used to emphasize martyrdom.

 

Martyr Word Trend

 

I also found it interesting that despite the theme of the texts was Martyrs, the word martyr itself was not found in five out of the eleven texts. The Word Trend to the left displays the use of the word in “Ignatius,” where martyr was used the most, at a count of six times.

 

That being said, what I did not learn, or rather understand, was what exactly vocabulary density is and why words with notable peaks in frequency was important. On a separate note, I do not think that Voyant is a tool to closely interpret texts, rather it is most useful to compare texts, find prevalent topics, and filter through quotes for support on a large scale. All in all, using Voyant for the first time helped me understand how it is considered a breakthrough in Digital Humanities.

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