Introduction to Distant Reading: World History 2

An introduction to using computers to analyze large amounts of text, or distant reading.

Learning objectives:

Student will be able to:

  1. Enter URLs or text into Voyant.

  2. Demonstrate an understanding of the Voyant tool through counting words and drawing conclusions from those counts.

  3. Demonstrated in their paragraphs the use of stopwords.

  4. Demonstrate that they can draw conclusions based on their use of Voyant, including word counts and word patterns.

1. Distant vs. close reading. A lesson using historical religious and popular culture texts.

Most reading we do is “close reading.” We read each word, place each word in the sentence or context, and then create meaning out of the words all strung together. For example, “today, I ate cake.” You must read those words in context and in an order to understand those words.

Sometimes, we read in ways that aren’t so “close.” For example, if you go to a weather website, and look up the forecast, you don’t read all the words in their context. You scan for the information you need, and ignore the rest. This is the first step to distant reading: recognizing that not all information included in a text is relevant and looking only for the material (or data) that is important.

For part of the Words module, we’re going to use distant reading websites to analyze large amounts of text.

For example, below I’ve placed the URLs of two important 19th century text, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Communist Manifesto (1848) into Voyant Tools, a website helps us do distant reading.

This distant reading tool counts words and looks for patterns. It is almost impossible to count words in large numbers for multiple books as a human, but computers can do it for us. This is what “distant reading” means: humans are far away from the texts and computers hold and manipulate the texts.

You can access Voyant at https://voyant-tools.org/
or at https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/mirrors. If these sites are not responding, you can also download and install a local version of Voyant on your own computer.

2. Enter two different URLs

Enter two different URLs
Enter two different URLs

3. What’s on the Voyant page

  1. Word cloud shows you the most used words.
  2. Reader shows you the text and allows you to select a word in the text.
  3. Trends shows you how often words were used througout the text.
  4. Summary shows you total counts of words.
  5. You can remove words from word cloud by clicking this toggle button to add stop words.
    Whats on the Voyant page

4. To remove words from the word cloud

After you’ve clicked on the toggle button, chose “Edit List” to add stop words.
To remove words from the word cloud

5. Added “species” to stop words.

I dont’ think “species” tells me anything (it’s already the title of the book) so I add it to my stop word list.
Added species to stop words.

6. Save and Confirm list.

Save and Confirm list.
Save and Confirm list.

7. The “Documents” tab in the lower left.

Shows the total word counts from different documents.

We see that Origin of the Species is much longer that *The Communist Manifesto. *
The Documents tab in the lower left.

8. Trends

On the right side, “Trends” shows you how often a word shoes up in a specific section of a work. Using two texts together makes this less useful. Putting in only one text would let you see if a single word was used more in the beginning, middle, or end of a text.
Trends

9. Trends for a single text

Trends for a single text
Trends for a single text

10. How can distant reading help us understand the past?

As humans we can only read a limited number of words at a time. Computers in the form of software, however, can “read” huge numbers of words, entire libraries in fact, fairly easily. More importantly, software can count, compare, and display patterns in ways we can’t.

Computers also help by revealing patterns that are contrary to our assumptions, which is especially important when studying colonialism and industrialization.

For this week, I want you to get used to using Voyant with low-stakes texts with which you are familiar.

Assignment

  1. DO NOT READ YOUR ARTICLE.
  2. Run one article of at least 1000 words through Voyant. The article can be about any subject other than sport reporting (too short) that is appropriate for the workplace and can come from any publication. If you want a suggestion, try LongReads
  3. In complete sentences, what conclusions could your draw from Voyant for your article? What do the word counts tell you about what the author valued or the people in the article valued? You should one paragraphs of around 150 words.
  4. Post the citation of your articles in your document above your analysis. Use Zotero Bibliography to create your citation.

Example

For example, I could have Voyant analyze articles about a recent political or cultural event. After filtering for the names in the article, I would look for what places are mentioned most and what adjectives get used to describe people, places or things. The longer the article, the better the tool works as we can see patterns in words with shorter works without computers.

Grading Criteria

Student

  1. Enter URLs or text into Voyant.

  2. Demonstrate an understanding of the Voyant tool through counting words and drawing conclusions from those counts.

  3. Demonstrated in their paragraphs the use of stopwords.

  4. Demonstrate that they can draw conclusions based on their use of Voyant, including word counts and word patterns.