An introduction to using computers to analyze large amounts of text, or distant reading.
Learning objectives:
Student will be able to:
Enter URLs or text into Voyant.
Demonstrate an understanding of the Voyant tool through counting words and drawing conclusions from those counts.
Demonstrated in their paragraphs the use of stopwords.
Demonstrate that they can draw conclusions based on their use of Voyant, including word counts and word patterns.
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.
After you’ve clicked on the toggle button, chose “Edit List” to add 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.
Shows the total word counts from different documents.
We see that Origin of the Species is much longer that *The Communist Manifesto. *
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.
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
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
Enter URLs or text into Voyant.
Demonstrate an understanding of the Voyant tool through counting words and drawing conclusions from those counts.
Demonstrated in their paragraphs the use of stopwords.
Demonstrate that they can draw conclusions based on their use of Voyant, including word counts and word patterns.