Success!

I finally got my webpage to look like a webpage! I was able to show all the topics over a few pages. They are extremely mediocre, but I was able to do everything, albeit at the elementary level. It was such a relief to see it all there and working! I had help from my tutors getting all of this together, but I was still able to do more on my own than I thought I would. They helped me to see where there were mistakes in my code and how to improve the ascetic, such as adding padding to the text so the words were not so close to the border. They also pointed me in the right direction when I got stuck. I did more than I thought I would and feel pretty good about my very simple website. It’s also very close to completion, which is good since this semester is closing quickly. This has been a very frustrating class, but having an end product now makes me feel better. I really struggled remembering things from past weeks when I fell behind to put up on my webpage, such as QGIS, but with my tutors I figured out how to put it on my website. For showing all of the Command Line things, I wrote out some code on the website and also put in an example. I also made a page for the last project, the video, and attached a link to my blog as well. I put in a home page and made other pages as well as links to them and links in them to get back to the home page. To end this “Failure Blog” positively and truthfully, for me, this is progress! It was a ton of hard work and a lot of time and frustration, but I did it! Feel free to check it out: maggiewaring.net!

Gaining Conceptual Understanding As We Go

This semester is blowing by fast. For Digital Humanities, I'm a little behind schedule. I am still trying to work through Python and understand it. I am also having the same trouble with the Control Panel, as they are related. I could follow the steps in the Python tutorial pretty well, but was having trouble using my own Control Panel. I am still having trouble wrapping my head the whole process (and even, to an extent, the purpose) of the Command Line and Python, as well as having trouble understanding how to run and use them. However, after reading and discussing about text mining and topic modeling, I can better see what Python and the Command Line are actually for, at least in one respect: topic modeling. Especially after looking at the readings for this week for topic modeling, I could see that Python cleans texts with OCR. At the beginning of the month, I was less sure about how this was going to fit into the course and what I was supposed to use it for. Now I can see it’s for cleaning PDFs so they can be mined, which is cool. I have not finished the whole tutorial yet but I had to come back to it after working with Voyant last week to get ready to work with Mallet. I haven’t started on Mallet yet, though. I did the readings for topic modeling, so I feel I know at least in theory, what I’ll be working with and for. I have not programmed the OCR yet either, which I will need to do before I start Mallet as well, at least if I am to going to try using my own PDFs (although I will probably end up using stock ones or finding full text URLs that have already been cleaned to use instead of my PDFs, which need to be cleaned with OCR). In all, I’m behind, but I will get there and I feel I know more about the things we are supposed to be doing. And even though I'm really struggling with being able to understand how to actually do these things step by step, I feel I conceptually understand what the programs are and what they are supposed to do. I feel I have progressed in general understanding, which is a comfort.

Text Mining Comments

So far this has been the most understandable week, in logic more than implementation, but I have had more success with applying this topic than the others throughout this course. Honestly this is not at all what I thought this class was going to be. I thought the “digital methods for the humanities” that we would be using would be more like text mining and even GIS (not programming), things that would be used more for researching, not for displaying it. But I felt I understood both of these topics better than the others in the class, and I think I could use them in my research. I still do not have a firm grasp of actually working these programs yet, but I'm getting there. For both, I just need to play with it more. I am so slow with figuring all this out that it takes me forever, and honestly, I want to devote more time to my other classes and my research. For this week, I did work through Voyant and I feel I understand it pretty well. The only problem I had while working on Voyant was that I was unable to get any PDFs to upload, even the neatly scanned, one page per slide ones. When I selected a word document, however, it was able to upload. The “Cirrus” was helpful to see the frequency of the words (once I edited it against common words). The graph of the word trends is cool to see where in the document a word occurs most often and in relation to the other words. This was fairly easy to navigate compared to what else we have done in this course. It was also very simple and a helpful visual tool that could also be used in a presentation as well as research. I feel close to fully understanding Voyant, but I have not gotten through Bookworm yet. I got registered and set up, but I am still working through the instructions. This is more difficult than Voyant and has more steps and more to do in general. I am slowly working through it though. I think I will be able to do this program better and faster than the other ones this semester, which is a little boost of encouragement I could use at this point in the semester and the class!