Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Topic: What should I read and what software should I use to do textual studies well?

Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Topic: What should I read and what software should I use to do textual studies well? http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-should-i-read-and-what-software-should-i-use-to-do-textual-studies-well Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Topic: What should I read and what software should I use to do textual studies well? en-US Sat, 19 Mar 2016 17:12:38 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 <![CDATA[Search]]> q http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/search.php johnlaudun on "What should I read and what software should I use to do textual studies well?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-should-i-read-and-what-software-should-i-use-to-do-textual-studies-well#post-1315 Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:59:42 +0000 johnlaudun 1315@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ It pains me to say it, but Rob is right, though I think some exposure to the command line is worth the time it takes. Something like Mallet is fairly advanced, but when I taught an intro to dh this past spring, I did get students to download IBM's word cloud Java app, which is command line only. The interesting side note to this is that students had to sign up with IBM's Developer Works in order to get the app, which also gives them access to the various pieces of Many Eyes, some of whose functionality is hard to replicate elsewhere -- as difficult as it sometimes is to get it to do what you want it to do. And that, I think, is sort of where we are right now. It often felt like I had a choice between teaching the ideas behind the various analytical possibilities or teaching the mechanics of the tools that could, but with no assurances that they would, realize those possibilities. I like the SEASR model very much, with its notion of graphical piping seeming to offer fairly advanced functionality with a very low entry threshold. The tools we ended up using most were Jim Dombrowski's Wordij and WordSmith. The down side to WordSmith is that it is proprietary (and it costs $) and it only runs in Windows. The upside is that you can get it to run over a network, and so you can use it across various labs and workstations on a campus; that it's fairly easy to use and for students to "see" results; and that it's popular among corpus linguists and others and so there are established protocols for using it. nelson.robert.k@gmail.com on "What should I read and what software should I use to do textual studies well?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-should-i-read-and-what-software-should-i-use-to-do-textual-studies-well#post-1314 Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:33:37 +0000 nelson.robert.k@gmail.com 1314@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Brian, <a href='http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/'>MALLET</a> would be useful for uncovering different thematic and topic threads and discovering words that are topically correlated to one another. That said, as a command line tool with no GUI MALLET likely would be more challenging for your students to use than Voyeur and some of the other tools that have been mentioned already. Stéfan Sinclair on "What should I read and what software should I use to do textual studies well?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-should-i-read-and-what-software-should-i-use-to-do-textual-studies-well#post-1313 Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:49:07 +0000 Stéfan Sinclair 1313@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Sounds like fun Brian, but I'm *so* hurt that you didn't include <a href="http://voyeurtools.org/">Voyeur Tools</a> in your preliminary list of text analysis tools to play with... :) You may also want to take a look that the accompanying documentation site on <a href="http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur">Hermeneutica</a>. Though less stable and not maintained, <a href="http://hyperpo.org/">HyperPo</a> might also be worth a look. In addition to Katherine's great suggestions, check out Lisa Spiro's <a href="https://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/w/page/17801672/FrontPage">DiRT</a>. Meagan Timney taught a course that may have some similarities to what you're doing, you may want to check out her list of <a href="http://mdouglas.etcl.uvic.ca/huma150/resources">resources and bibliography</a> (especially the section on text analysis). I think it's useful to provide an example of using tools to do interesting things (not just descriptions and theorization of tools and text analysis generally). You might want to consider <a href="http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/3/361.abstract">Tanya Clements LLC article on Stein</a>. A quicker example of rapid analysis (with tools) is something I wrote with Geoffrey Rockwell on the <a href="http://hermeneuti.ca/rhetoric/now-analyze-that">Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright</a> dust up during 2008 American elections. Everything I'm writing here makes me think of a dozen others I should mention, so maybe I should just stop there for now and let others chime in. katherineharris on "What should I read and what software should I use to do textual studies well?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-should-i-read-and-what-software-should-i-use-to-do-textual-studies-well#post-1312 Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:25:06 +0000 katherineharris 1312@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Brian, I've used TaPoR for a few of my classes to offer data mining (<a href="http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal" rel="nofollow">http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal</a>) capabilities to, say, Heart of Darkness. We looked cursorily at the recurring use of elephant, tusk, ivory in the novel and were surprised to find that none of these are really prominently used, especially considering that the entire novel is based on the commodification of a living thing. You might also think about using JUXTA to compare multiple version -- similar to a Hinman Collator (<a href="http://www.juxtasoftware.org/)" rel="nofollow">http://www.juxtasoftware.org/)</a>. MONK is another good one, but I haven't used it in class yet so I can't attest to its pedagogical efficacy (<a href="http://gautam.lis.illinois.edu/monkmiddleware/public/index.html)" rel="nofollow">http://gautam.lis.illinois.edu/monkmiddleware/public/index.html)</a>. TokenX is another great one for visualization (<a href="http://jetson.unl.edu:8080/cocoon/tokenx/index.html?file=../xml/base.xml)" rel="nofollow">http://jetson.unl.edu:8080/cocoon/tokenx/index.html?file=../xml/base.xml)</a>. Ok, in terms of readings about textual studies/scholarship, I find that undergraduates fair better when I just explain it to them. If they want to move further into textual scholarship, I have references for them. But reading the big, heavy stuff can be a bit daunting. McGann, Greetham (Textual Scholarship), Tanselle, etc, are the big guns. Might I suggest a book that's geared towards undergraduates and beginning graduate students? Erick Keleman's Textual Editing & Criticism: An Introduction is mighty fine for your purposes (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Textual-Editing-Criticism-Erick-Kelemen/dp/0393929426)" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Textual-Editing-Criticism-Erick-Kelemen/dp/0393929426)</a>. You might also take a look at my reading schedule for a Materials & Methods grad course that I taught a few years ago; some of the articles might be meaty enough for your purposes but not more than mouthful: <a href="http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/ResearchMethods/Methods_Intro.htm#sch" rel="nofollow">http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/ResearchMethods/Methods_Intro.htm#sch</a> It sounds like what you want to do is build a scholarly edition and then add in some scholarly assessments. We've been fighting a bit about this in the textual realms -- if a crowd-sourced digital edition is the way to go. Ray Siemens, et al. have been working on a format for this (dynamic social edition). You might read through these two articles for help: Bertrand Gervais, "Is There a Text on this Screen?" A Companion to Digital Literary Studies Ken Price, "Electronic Scholarly Editions," A Companion to Digital Literary Studies Then you might see these about using tools: The Babbage Engine "Where Computer Science and Cultural Studies Collide," Matthew Kirschenbaum "Literature to Infinity," Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee "Algorithmic Criticism," A Companion to Digital Literary Studies , Stephen Ramsay "Quantitative Analysis and Literary Studies," A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, David Hoover "Literary Alzheimer’s," New York Times Magazine (These last two categories of suggestions are all available online & in my reading schedule for my DH Honors course from last Fall, 9/21 & 9/28: <a href="http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/DigLit_F10/Schedule.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/DigLit_F10/Schedule.htm</a> Two students and I are currently grappling with how to represent a Modernist artist's renderings of some Wilde poetry. We will probably go with Omeka, but we're intending to have this peer reviewed and live on our library servers as a piece of scholarship. (We'd also love to have the page turner plug-in from the Internet Archive but that might be a pipe dream with Omeka.) Bethany, Neil, Ray, Kirstyn, Whitney, Matt K., Steve R., et al might have better/more suggestions too. Lots of primers on how to create a scholarly edition exist, but I haven't found a really great introduction to building a digital scholarly edition just yet. Please let me know if you do! and please share with us your finalized syllabus. briancroxall on "What should I read and what software should I use to do textual studies well?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-should-i-read-and-what-software-should-i-use-to-do-textual-studies-well#post-1311 Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:58:22 +0000 briancroxall 1311@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ I'm super excited to be "Introduction to Digital Humanities" this fall. As I've been turning over the course in my mind, I've known that I've wanted to do one or more projects with the students, probably using our special collections, which tend to be quite strong in particular swaths of literature. This week I sat down with <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/LizChaseMARBL">Liz Chase</a>, one of our special collections librarians, and brainstormed. We came up with a great project involving <a href="http://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/duffy834/?keywords=duffy">our holdings of Carol Ann Duffy's notebooks</a>. In short, we want to do some comparisons between how she writes in her 1999 volume, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Wife-Carol-Ann-Duffy/dp/057119995X/briacrox-20">The World's Wife</a>, and her previous volumes. We're interested in thematic material, vocabulary she uses, poetic styles, and so forth. But as I've been working to design the project, I've come to realize that the students' work (to say nothing of my teaching) will be improved by the inclusion of some readings on textual scholarship along these lines. But I don't know this field at all. What's more, I've been trying to think about what sort of software we might most profitably use to help push our analysis after creating a dataset of the texts. I'm guessing we'll want to represent word counts, word clouds, line structures, and more. My first thought is <a href="http://seasr.org/">SEASR</a>, but I'm not familiar with the tool and I'm not sure if it's overkill or underkill or totally off the mark. I can always use <a href="http://www.wordle.net/">Wordle</a>, but I would like to have more options. And perhaps if I really knew this field of scholarship then it would be easier for me to know which tools I should be using. What I really need, then, is a suggestion of books or articles that I should read so that our class proceeds thoughtfully on the project with an understanding of what's been done in the past. Any tool suggestions would be welcome as well.