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!