Short Tutorial

Voyant

nGrams

Bookworm

Group 1 - Voyant

Tips

• Suggest that you use Chrome if you are on Windows. It is most responsive and resilient against screen lockups for this tool.
• Your exploration will begin at https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=bd21a9fdbe8a7e67556ede72ab51d10d
• Help files for customizing the tool are at: http://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/start
• Choose roles of recorder and presenter

As a group explore and discuss

• Spend some time exploring the interface.  What can you tell about the underlying data as you explore with the tool? 
  
  • Is the text clean? Indexed? Filtered? Anything else interesting you note about the data? 
• Explore the functions of the tool and consider them critically.
  • What can you manage to do?  What is this tool good for?
  • What sorts of things did you want to do, but could not?
  • What can you infer from the interface about the text? What is still opaque?
• Do you feel you can make claims about the intellectual content of the text based on the tool and its visualizations?  To what extent? (Feel free to reach a little)
  
  • Do any words trend together? Inversely?
  • Can you isolate phrases of interest?
  • Do any of the the visualizations help illustrate what you notice/assert regarding the text? Are some misleading? Confusing?

After your exploration, be prepared to report your findings to the other team(s) and take their questions.

Group 2 - nGrams

Group 3 - Bookworm

Bringing it all together

• What sort of conclusions/suspicions can we draw from canned tools in general?
  • In what ways are these useful?
  • What do we wish these could do?
  • What do they obscure?