Words 2 Assignment: Distant Reading Large Bodies of Text to Understand the Past

Due Thursday at 10 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:

Input three different texts into Voyant.
Edit stopwords to filter out commonly used terms.
Input different terms and then analyze the historical importance of certains terms within each text.
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 or the alternate hosting site at http://voyant.dges.ou.edu/

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 This file will download to your computer.

Popol Vuh: http://www.mesoweb.com/publications/Christenson/PV-Literal.pdf
This version will require some work from you as it has both the Mayan and English, so editing stopwords will be key.

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.

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

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”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 Popul Vuh. You can switch to “Raw Frequencies” if you click on the toggle directly to the left of the blue question mark 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.
You can play with lots of options under “Display” that may help you visualize your data.

Options for tool.

Voyant Tools

Write a one paragraph analysis for each text based on you use Voyant.

What do your results suggest to you about the period in which the texts where written?

Writing one paragraphs about word trends is intellectually tough, I know. I’m asking you to relate what you’ve learned from your background reading of the history of these religions and texts, and use that background to craft a thesis about what you see in Voyant.

To model an analysis, consider the image below. In the image below, you can see the raw counts for each of the terms and the “Relative Frequencies.” I can see that water is used more often than wine, eat, and drink. There is no mention of wine in the Popol Vuh, which suggests to me that society likely didn’t grow grapes wine. I can also see that the use of the terms drink, eat, and water are about the same in the Bible as in the Popul Vuh, but the Laws of Manu use the term water significantly more. So, my analysis might look back at my background reading on Hinduism to understand why water seems to be more important to the authors of the Laws of Manu than to the Popol Vuh or the Bible.

To earn a passing grade your paragraphs should include:

At least 75 words but fewer than 150 words per paragraph.
Have a clear thesis (an opinion backed by cited evidence)
Make specific reference to one of our background readings from the Words readings.
Clearly explain your analysis of Voyant so that another class member could understand your analysis.
Clearly tie the word count trends you analyze to a specific period in the history we are studying, not to a general period in the past.