Tag: distant reading

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While transcribing my assigned memoir, I paid close attention to every individual word, rather than looking at the document as a whole. However, after my transcription was complete, I was able to read over the document and really pay attention to the actual story of Joesph Lingard’s life. My memoir is mainly about Joesph Lingard and his family and how he found his way into the congregation. The memoir discusses how Joesph and his wife were extremely unhappy and joined the congregation to rid themselves of this unhappiness. At first, Joesph and his family did not have a home near the congregation, so the brethren actually offered his family a place to stay until they found something more permanent. The memoir continues on following Joesph through all steps of his journey into joining the congregation. In the end, Joesph falls ill. As we move forward, I am excited to look more into not only Joesph but his family members, specifically his son, because they were so important in the memoir.\

Edward Whitley writes, “the virtue of information visualization is that it can make complex data sets more accessible than they otherwise might be” (188). Whitely is correct in that information visualization tools, such as Voyant, make complex text, like the Moravian memoirs, much more digestible than they might seem at first. Our group research question is: Was the congregation perceived in a positive or negative way in the lives of Moravian People? This approach has been somewhat helpful in answering our research question, but it certainly doesn’t offer a complete answer. This approach has been helpful in getting a better sense of how the Moravian people viewed the congregation because we have been able to pinpoint where the word congregation has been used and the words surrounding it, as I talk about below. 

Using Voyant has allowed me to interact with my assigned memoirs in a new way. TextualArc allowed me to see the flow of keywords throughout my document in a neat visual. This tool painted out a nice overview of the text, and “creat[ed] visual abstractions of textual patterns” (193), which I used before diving into other tools that gave more detailed data. In a way, I used this tool to see a summary of my document.  In my opinion, the most helpful tools on Voyant are those that allow you to see the frequency of different words in the text. Both the Cirrus word cloud and Document Terms allowed to see the frequently used terms in two very different, but equally helpful, ways. First, the word cloud emphasizes a frequently used to term by making it larger. Observing my word cloud, I was able to see that congregation, heart, saviour, son, and brethren were most frequently used. I did not find any collocates to be particularly useful because no words were associated with another more than once, so no phrases presented themselves as frequently used in the document. These words allowed me to see that Joesph Lingard’s story of how he joined congregation was more instrumental to the text than I originally thought. However, the Document Terms gives the quantitative data to see how many times each of those words were actually used in the specific document, but not the whole corpus. For example, Document Terms showed that heart was used 18 times throughout the text and showed a trend line. This trend line is an especially helpful visualization tool in that is shows me where in the text the word is used most frequently, which allows me to ask more questions about that particular section of the document. For example, where the word heart is most frequently used, Joesph was speaking about his journey to join the congregation and how the brethren offered him lodging. Joseph’s frequent usage of “heart” shows that these kind actions deeply affected him. Overall, These tools are helpful because “amid the chaos of more frequent repetitions,” the tools allow me to see patterns that I “may have missed with close reading” (191).

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Because of the new wave of technology, people are able to gather more information and have it become more accessible to a larger audience. The ability to access a plethora of resources on various subjects gives digital archives an advantage over archival documents. It is more time efficient to access documents on an online database than searching through a physical collection of printed documents. Search mode enables people to save time by instantly looking up whatever information rather than manually looking through each print. Another advantage to creating digital versions of documents is the fact that physical documents deteriorate over time due to weathering and physical handling. However, a disadvantage of creating digital artifacts is losing the authenticity of the original works. The physical and written structure of printed documents and the style of handwriting get lost in translation when they are turned into digital artifacts. Due to this, learning about a period’s culture is not possible because of the disappearing evidence of handwriting styles, writing styles, etc.. The way people write shows the cultural expectations for that time period. For example, flowery poetry was popular from the late 1700s to the 1900s in Britain and the United States. Knowing the long, wordy style of “flowery poetry” it indicates what those cultures valued: artistic and emotive expression. Although digital documents can use visualization like word clouds to show the most commonly used words in a document, it does not show the adjectives in between which distinguishes flowery poetry from other styles. In terms of what kind of knowledge digital archives offer, they give people access to a multitude of documents from all time periods which enables them to make connections over long periods of time unlike physical archives which are more tiring to look though.

It is hard to answer the ultimate question of which method is better because each has its own advantages and disadvantages. However, the way people read digital versus print documents is different. So in a sense, digital artifacts do supplant our needs for print because visualization tools like word pattern graphs and text images that use shape, color, texture help the mind process the digital information better. However, reading online documents by browse and search mode encourages readers to skim and search for the information they want instead of reading slowly. Print documents require inspection, sift, and synthesis because they do not include visualization like word clouds. Close reading is a good skill for understanding the little nuances in a text and aids in understanding the information on a deeper level since it focuses on word choice and phrasing. To encourage that in digital texts, it might be effective to not put in so many images that it distracts the reader from reading the text itself. It is easy to mistake those images as conclusions themselves rather than a means to a conclusion.

Comparing the Moravian Lives project with other large DH projects, similarities like categorizing documents. The Moravian website has a map which enables the reader to visualize where the documents originate from. They are also categorized by language, country and archive. Quanitfying Kissinger also uses network analysis to visualize all the information sourced from the documents for comparison. Because large DH porjects have large quanitities of data, they use distant reading to visualize patterns to understand the overarching ideas.

 

 

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I believe that we have started to look at textual material on the screen more than on a manuscript/printed page. Why go to the document when you can bring the document to you?  The rise of technology is what is forcing humanities toward digital humanities: it has become effortless to pull up a document on your phone or computer. This switch to digital humanities means the research practices in the humanities must change as well. For digital humanities, a change in research practices does not simply mean understanding how to scan and upload documents. A large portion of the practice requires understanding of the use of visualization In the Whitley reading, Johanna Trucker defined visualization as, “A methodological reversal which makes visualization a procedure rather than a product and integrates interpretation into digitization in a popular way.” I love how she defined this because the last eight words really capture the essence of digital humanities: ‘integrates interpretation into digitization in a popular way.’ With the help of visualization, humanities will not fall behind in the wave of technological advance.

Digitized materials supplant the need to view to physical original copies. With the transition to visualization in the work of digital humanities, new ways of reading have come about. According to the Whitley reading, two new ways of reading are spatial reading and distant reading. Spatial reading means extracting the valuable information from a text so that you do not have to read it in a normal manner. Distant reading refers to stepping back and looking at trends between thousands of books/documents over time. These two new forms of reading supplant the need to view the original copies. I am not saying that we should just throw out the physical copies, but as long as we scan them, then we should not need to use them as much anymore.

Example of distant reading

I would say there is not yet a consensus for digitizing and editing archival material. However, that does not mean that some common practices for digitizing material have not arisen. One practice that was mentioned in the Whitley reading is tag clouds. These tag clouds can be designed in different ways, but their main use is to show the statistics for word count or word uniqueness in a document. Tag clouds are used to turn reading from a qualitative process to a quantitative process. The biggest advancement of tag clouds is that it connects with the idea of distant reading. By using tag clouds to look at word uniqueness in different documents, we can see how the uniqueness of words has changed over time. Tag clouds are even used on the DH site to show the most common places that have come up in their documents.

Example of a tag cloud on the DH site