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Distant Reading Exercises

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HemingwayApp: 

Put in some text you've written, to conduct basic stylometrics. See your text's grade level. Look at your frequency of adverbs. How many hyper-embedded sentences have you used? We'll graph our data together, live in Google Docs, to get a sense of the range within the class.

DataBasic:

Find two editorials on the same issue, ideally from ideologically opposed newspapers. Put them each first into WordCount, then into SameDiff. Again, we'll graph our data together: What co-sine similarity scores?

JStor's Text Analyzer: 

Find a PDF of an article you like. Put it into JStor's Text Analyzer; calibrate the topic modeling sliders until you're focusing on the keywords that matter to you. Watch how it shapes the kinds of results you get. 

SentimentViz: 

Put in several search terms and explore how the Tweet data is charted in terms of emotion, tone, and content. Perform a "sanity check" of the Tweets you examine. Does the sentiment analysis seem to match what you're seeing, overall? What surprises you?

VoyantTools:

Pick two Project Gutenberg texts -- maybe two from the same author, or from the same time period. Download and then clean them (remove the PG footer and any other framing text). Upload the two texts into Voyant. Experiment with the various frames visible to you: Concordance, Links, Terms. Some things here are similar to DataBasic; others are more off-the-wall. Let's especially talk about "Bubbles" and "ASDF," tools that really enable a kind of "distant reading" of an individual text that isn't data-driven but instead about the sort of sonic experience of a text. Some research suggests that ears hear patterns better than eyes see them; these tools potentially let you do that.

TAPoR:

Examine the Text Analysis Portal for Research. Select several tools that seem interesting; read about them. Are they still working? Many aren't -- but some truly interesting academic experiments that never hit "big time" are visible here. We'll talk about what you find and I'll highlight a couple.

Brief introduction to other tools:

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  1. Distant Reading Elizabeth Chamberlain