Introduction
This second part of distant reading has you use a simple algorithm website (Gorby) to compare and contrast two texts.
Learning Outcomes
- Students will demonstrate the ability to plan and execute a project together.
- Students will demonstrate the ability to manage shared files.
- Students will analyze two texts and compare their findings both quantitatively and qualitatively.
- Students will produce a reading report based on their readings.
- Students will demonstrate the ability to copy just text with no extra code from a transcript.
Instructions
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Chose one of the podcasts you listened to for this week as your A comparison text.
- Black Death survivors gave their descendants a genetic advantage — but with a cost
- For Inca Road Builders, Extreme Terrain Was No Obstaclefor-inca-road-builders-extreme-terrain-was-no-obstacle
- Timbuktu’s ‘Badass Librarians’: Checking Out Books Under Al-Qaida’s Nose
Use the following for your B comparison text.
- Copy just the text of your A and your B text in to the following three websites.
Verb finder
Noun finder
Analyze text
- Answer the following questions in complete sentences in a Word file in your Teams folder about BOTH texts in all three websites.
a. How accurate is the distant reading tool? That is, do you see any errors? If there are errors, what are they?
b. For the verb and noun analyzer, what are the most popular verbs and Proper Nouns?
c. For the Analyze text website, chose four statistics that you find meaningful to compare from the stats on the right hand side. What are the numbers for both your A and B sample. What similarlities or differences to do you see?
d. Based on your comparison of the A and B texts, what are the biggest differences and what are the greatest similarities between these texts?
e. How might a tool such as these be useful if you compared hundreds of different podcast transcripts?
