Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 2)

Voyant

Voyant is a tool for distant reading. It helps us identify patterns within a text or set of texts (corpus). Today, we’ll use it to take a birds-eye view of how people view communities in the region. Remember that as a quantitative method, distant reading generally asks us to formulate a hypothesis about what we might find when we analyze our texts. So what similarities and differences might you expect about the texts you’ve chosen? You can compare across geography (St. Louis vs. Edwardsville, for instance) or across chronology (St. Louis in 1860 vs. St. Louis today) or some combination thereof.

1. Choose at least two texts to compare. You can choose from encyclopedia entries in this Google Drive folder, and/or you can use Wikipedia articles (current or older versions).
2. Skim at least one of them and develop a hypothesis about what you might find when you compare your texts.
3. Input the two texts as a corpus and choose a visualization with which to test your hypothesis.
4. Write a blog post describing your texts, question, hypothesis, and results.

Palladio

Palladio is a tool for visualizing and exploring data through maps, network charts, and categories. We’re going to begin by creating our own data set of immigration and migration data using the 1900 Census.

1. Working in a group, choose a census from this folder and add at least three lines apiece to the spreadsheet. (If you get stuck on handwriting, let me know and we can look at it together.
2. Together, we’ll put the data into Palladio and see what patterns emerge.

• Census images
• Census spreadsheet

Although we often think of corrections to a text when we imagine editing, literary editions serve lots of functions (and very rarely is correction one of them!). Literary editions layer different kinds of information about a text through annotations, including background on the period or place, context from the author’s life and other works, and variants across different editions of the text. In this way, they help to make the text more approachable and help the reader engage with the text more deeply.

In a printed edition, you’ll often encounter these annotations as footnotes. In digital form, they come in lots of shapes and sizes: links to other pages, pop-ups, and digital footnotes that link back and forth between text and annotation.

Today, we’re using the Recovery Hub Digital Edition Template to annotate Frederick Douglass’s speech on the Dred Scott decision. You read this speech last week and made note of areas where further clarification and background might help people understand the text better. Today, we’ll put that into action.

The Recovery Hub’s template is designed to make the process of creating a digital edition simpler. Although there’s lots of code involved, you don’t have to write it! Instead, you can use their existing code and lightly customize it to suit your text. Today, you don’t have to interact with the code at all! But if you’re interested — maybe you want to try your hand at digitizing your family’s recipes, like we talked about last week? — you can find the template on GitHub.

Instructions

I’ve set up the project for us by creating a repository for our code and cloning the template. Here are your tasks:

1. Head over to this Google doc, which contains the speech. Leave a comment on the section of text you’d like to annotate with your proposed annotation and your name. This could be a single word, a phrase, or a sentence.
2. We’ll discuss the annotations together and see what themes emerge.
3. Once you’ve got a sense of the kinds of annotations people have proposed, go back and fill out your annotation. Here are a few points to touch on:
   • Why this annotation? What about the text you selected seemed like it needed further engagement?
   • Explain the term, concept, or other content.
   • Link to at least one external resource.