Immerse Yourself in Voyant!
Building upon your initial foray into Voyant tools with your blog post from earlier this week, we would like you to conduct a “comparative textual analysis.”
You will work either with (a) just the selected object from your home institution or (b) the selected object from your home institution and one other object of your choice (from your home institution or another LACOL institution).
GOALS:
- Engagement with your selected object (e.g. week #2 lab) from your campus’s digital collections (*** If you have not already, please choose your object now ***).
- Visualization of your selected object(s) and how it relates to social justice.
- Develop a deeper proficiency of the Voyant tools.
- Conduct a “Comparative Textual Analysis.”
“Comparative Textual Analysis” SPECS:
- Write up a Report that addresses the questions in the “Visualize, Compare, and Consider” section below.
- Include 2-3 of the most meaningful Voyant visualizations.
- Word count: 400-500 words.
- Make certain to have a clear introduction and conclusion.
- Provide a fun and creative title to your lab report.
- Double-spaced.
- Use MLA or Chicago format.
LAB INSTRUCTIONS:
Select:
- If you have not already, please select your object from your home campus digital collection. (Please see week #2 lab).
- Peruse and select two different sections from your object.
- The distinct portions should be related by time (i.e. day, week, month, year, etc.).
- Don’t do an entire decade or longer period of time—start with a small bit of data.
- You will be creating two different files– one for each section (or object).
- Nota Bene: Alternatively, you can compare your selected object with a similar but distinct second object from the same digital collection or from another digital collection. In other words, you can compare two different objects for this “Comparative Textual Analysis” lab.
- Now that you’re familiar with Voyant tools, what makes the most sense for each file? How many days/months/years should go in each file? In other words, what is the “granularity?” How do you need to structure the corpus to balance the granularity of each file?
- Consider: If one text file contains an entire year and another file contains just one month, how will that affect your graph? Your word cloud?
Assemble & Create Your Corpus:
- “Corpus” is another word for a set of documents. For more detailed info see: “Creating a Corpus” on the Voyant Tools Help page.
- Open an existing corpus (click on the “Open” button under the text box).
- Type or paste text into the main text box (this creates a corpus with one document).
- Type or paste one or more URLs into the main text box (one URL per line).
- Click the “Upload” button under the text box to use files from your computer.
- Make sure your two files are named differently so that they will be easy to distinguish from one another.
Upload Your Corpus to Voyant:
- To add more text files/multiple files to Voyant: find the Documents tab in the lower left corner, press the Modify button, then Add, and then Upload.
- Upload your two files.
Visualize, Compare, and Consider:
- Try out the various visualizations in Voyant. Which work best (or not) for a comparison between these two corpora?
- How is Voyant a useful (or not) digital tool to analyze your selected object?
- What did the comparative aspect (i.e. using two files/corpora) offer you? Did you learn more or less about your topic?
- How might you use comparative text analysis methods in your own project?
Submission Details:
- Submit the lab report as a PDF to Canvas by the end of the day (local time) on Saturday, July 10th.
- You can write the report in Google Docs, Word, Pages, or another application. Just be sure to save as a PDF
