Instructors: Sharon Leon, Sheila Brennan, and Resident Instructor Lincoln Mullen

Readings

• Cohen, Dan. “Searching for the Victorians.” Dan Cohen, October 4, 2010. http://www.dancohen.org/2010/10/04/searching-for-the-victorians/.
• Goldstone, Andrew, and Ted Underwood. “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us,” May 28, 2014. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/49323.
• Riddell, Alan Beye. “How to Read 22,198 Journal Articles: Studying the History of German Studies with Topic Models.” In Distant Readings: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Matt Erlin and Lynne Tatlock, 91–114. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. PDF
• Underwood, Ted. “Seven Ways Humanists Are Using Computers to Understand Text.” The Stone and the Shell, June 4, 2015. https://tedunderwood.com/2015/06/04/seven-ways-humanists-are-using-computers-to-understand-text/.

Activities

Morning

• Discuss readings
• Digital History Methods: Close and distant reading through application of text and data mining techniques using corpora of texts to find patterns and to visualize those patterns
• Hands-on Session: Use Bookworm to search and identify rhetorical trends in literature found in Open Library
• Demo: Commonalities of all Textual Analysis
  • Finding the right tools for your sources:
    Meaning of words and documents, how do words change over time: Frequency of a term over time; Concordance to a corpus; Named entity recognition; Text reuse; Semantics of documents; Semantics of words.

Afternoon

• Demo: LDA Topic Modeling, https://mimno.infosci.cornell.edu/jsLDA/index.html
• Hands-on Session: Using Voyant Tools, participants will perform word frequency, corpus grid, corpus summary, and keyword in context analysis
  • Dataset: “Sunday School Books in Nineteenth Century America.” MSU Libraries, http://www.lib.msu.edu/ssbdata/.
  • If you want to run the Voyant server on your own computer, try this: http://docs.voyant-tools.org/resources/run-your-own/voyant-server/
• Hands-on: How do you form a historical question with textual analysis. Review sites in small groups:
• Group 1: Larry, Kerry, Bethany, Aaron
• Group 2: Marybeth, Joe, Sarah, Paul
• Group 3: Judy R. Alvis, Alan, Anne
• Group 4: Kristen, Michael, Liz, Ely
• Group 5: Tammy, Jess, Tom, Judy G.
• Group 6: Robin, Johann, Steve, Jonathan
  • Viral Texts: http://viraltexts.org/ — Group 1
  • With Criminal Intent: http://criminalintent.org/— Group 2
  • Language of the State of the Union: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-language-of-the-state-of-the-union/384575/–Group 2
  • Mapping the State of Union: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/mapping-the-state-of-the-union/384576/–Group 1
  • Mining the Dispatch: http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/–Group 3
  • America’s Public Bible: http://americaspublicbible.org/–Group 4
  • Robots Reading Vogue: http://dh.library.yale.edu/projects/vogue/–Group 3
  • Mining and Mapping the Production of Space: http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=93–Group 4
  • Declassification Engine: http://www.history-lab.org/research–Group 5
  • Quantifying Kissinger: http://blog.quantifyingkissinger.com/–Group 6
  • Under this name she is fitly described: http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/moravec-full.html Group 5
  • Signs@40: http://signsat40.signsjournal.org/topic-model/ Group 6

Homework

• Please fill out Survey 2: http://history2016.doingdh.org/midpoint-survey-2/
• Research Planning: Consider how distant reading might apply to individual project
• Watch the Omeka screencast on the Guest User and Contribution plugins: https://vimeo.com/165200216
• Install the Guest User and Contribution plugins to your Omeka install
  • http://omeka.org/add-ons/plugins/contribution/
  • http://omeka.org/add-ons/plugins/guest-user/
  • http://docs.reclaimhosting.com/omeka/uploading-plugins-to-omeka

Extra Material

Zotero Folder – Day 6 – Introduction to Textual Analysis

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