Page History

...

• bring text to play with in Voyant. Input format can be plain text, a PDF (with OCR), a MS Word Document or a URL for HTML analysis.

Going down the rabbit hole: anatomy of a digital book

...

Let's look again at the Arapaho gospel of St. Luke.  Switch to text view.

• What is a word? How would you define this for a computer?
• What isn't a word? How would you tell a computer to exclude these?
• Can you think of special cases where tokens might contain more than one word?
• Are there words we prefer not to count at all?
• What sets of rules would we need to tokenize?  Would these be ordered in any specific way?
• Is there a "right way" to tokenize?

...

• How do challenges with OCR intersect with strategies for computational analysis of text?  What might be effective strategies to deal with these challenges?
• What exactly is the "text"?  Can you think of parts of a book that you might not want to include in your analysis? Why or why not? If you would, how would you exclude these parts?

Introducing Control - "Microanalysis" and Voyant

Voyant

Voyant is a low barrier text analysis tool that delivers a rich, interactive interface and a variety of visualizations.  Input format can be plain text, a PDF (with OCR), a MS Word Document or a URL for HTML analysis. Upload of any material will be subject to the Voyant

...

privacy policy. Sample texts and URLs for analysis are listed below for experimentation, but feel free to use other source data that interests you. 

• Sample texts, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. Use the plain text version.
  
  • Crane, Stephen, 1871-1900. The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War.
  • Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870. A Tale of Two Cities.
  • Upham, Charles Wentworth, 1802-1875. Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II
• Sample URLS: copy and paste into the Voyant upload browser window to get started.Sample URLS: copy and paste into the Voyant upload browser window to get started.

  • Economics of Crisis - http://www.economicsofcrisis.com/indications.html 

  • Instructions to major John Sullivan. Washington, George, 1732-1799. The writings of George Washington from the original manuscript sources. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library

  • Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code - http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92preface.html

(1) Exerting

...

control

• • observe counts
  • stopwords
• What does exerting control do to our results?  Does it change the validity of our assertions?
• What is signal?  What is noise?

(2) Visualization of derived data

We calculate frequency

• Why not express our counts simply (as counts)?  Why calculate frequencies?
• Is this misleading?  If so, in what ways?

...