Words Lesson Plan II: Distant Reading Large Bodies of Text to Understand the Past

Due Friday at 8 P.M.

In this assignment, we’ll attempt to answer how we compare large historically-important religious texts to each other in a systematic way?

You will use Voyant tools to distantly read 3 major religious works and draw conclusions based on you analysis of the data Voyant provides you.

Learning Objectives: Following this lesson you will be able to:

  1. Input three different texts into Voyant.

  2. Edit stopwords to filter out commonly used terms.

  3. Input different terms and then analyze the historical importance of certain terms within each text.

  4. Write one paragraph on each text (book) that makes an argument for the historical significance of a term or group of terms.

Getting Started

Once again we’ll be using Voyant Tools (http://voyant-tools.org)

We will be working with the three texts you’ve read about thus far. Now we will work with the entire texts, at once. You’ll need copies of each text that Voyant can read.

Bible : ftp://ftp.cs.princeton.edu/pub/cs226/textfiles/bible.txt

Popol Vuh: http://www.authenticmaya.com/popoleng.pdf

Laws of Manu: http://jacknorton.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/LawsOfManu.txt

Analyze each text or together.

You can enter all three texts into Voyant together, or you can enter them one by one, as above.

The examples below will be with all three texts analyzed together because you have not seen this done before.

To start, we need to edit our stopwords.(1)

Select “Edit List” and add common words you want to exclude from your analysis.

I’ve added “shall, unto, lord, god, said.” You may add others and your word cloud will look different if you analyze the texts one at a time.

Save and confirm your save.

Should you edit even more stop words?

After the standard words have been filtered out, you may find that there are still some common words that you don’t think need to be in the analysis. You may wish to edit out more stopwords after you’ve done it once or even twice.

Now you have a text for your analysis.

You may wish to interrogate the texts for specific words.

I’ve entered “water,”“wine,” “eat,” and “drink” into the terms (1) and then clicked the boxes (2) to the left to show the “Relative frequency”(3) of these terms.

Note you can change the “Frequencies” measure. “Relative” frequency shows you how often the word is used compared to all the other words in the text. Below, you can see that the term “Water” is used at a higher frequency in the Laws of Manu than on the Bible or the Popol Vuh (labeled Microsoft). You can switch to “Raw Frequencies” (4) to see the total number of times the term is used. (Second image). “Water” is used many more times in the Bible than in other texts, but that’s the result of the Bible having many more words.