Week 11, 11/8

Week 11: Text Analysis (contd) & Technology, Language and Culture

For Monday: Text Analysis Practice Guidelines

1.       Download and install TextSTAT (if possible, do so on the lab computer as well as your home computer)
2.       Visit Project Gutenberg to select a corpus (collection of texts) of texts to analyze
3.       Corpus ideas:

  • Texts by a single author (e.g. Austen)
  • Texts authored by female authors from the same genre and/or period (e.g. 18th c. Victorian)
  • Texts within a single genre (e.g. Epistolary texts; Beat poet texts)
  • Texts from a particular period (e.g. 1750-1780)

4.       When you download the texts from Project Gutenberg, save them in .txt format (found in Word under “Save as”… “other formats”) and select the Unicode UTF 8 encoding format
5.       In TextSTAT, select Corpus then “create a new corpus” (for this step: you will just give your corpus a name)
6.       Then, open your corpus and select “add local files” – You can add as many as you wish
7.       [you can also create more than one corpus for comparative purposes or for separate analyses]
8.       When you’ve loaded your files, use the words forms, concordance, and citation tools to analyze the corpus and to look for patterns

For Wed: Visualizations
“How do visual representations of complex data help humanities scholars ask new questions? How does visual rhetoric shape the way we relate to documents and artifacts?” (from http://hyperstudio.mit.edu/events/about/)

Tufte on Visualizations (crucial – read first); then, consider some examples:

Blog Assignment (due Mon 11/15): Review the visualizations presented in class today. How is and why are visualizations being used? What could we understand better through visualization? Propose a visualization aspect for your research project (in detail); what kinds of information could your project most effectively convey using visualization?

Next Topic: Are language and writing skills deteriorating as a result of email, IM, and texting?
1. Readings from David Crystal & Naomi Baron
2. Readings from Mark Bauerlein’s: The Dumbest Generation (tagged as a Google book)
3. How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? (see all responses here: http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_index.html#responses)

  • a. Sherry Turkle: “How Computers Change the Way we Think”
  • b. Clay Shirky: “The Shock of Inclusion” http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_1.html#shirky
  • c. Richard Dawkins “Net Gain” http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_1.html#dawkins
  • d. Blog Assignment: How is the internet changing the way you think?

4. Video: Digital Nation- Multitasking – are we getting dumber? http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/resources/multitasking/
Take both quizzes
5. In-class collaboration on research project

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