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.  Attempt to make claims about the intellectual content of the text based on the tool and its visualizations. (Feel free to reach a little.)
  
  • Try constraining the various tools to specific terms or phrases.  Do any words trend together? Inversely?
  • Can you isolate phrases of interest?
  • Identify and operate the sliders - in what ways could these be useful?
  • Adjust the stopwords to dampen "noise" and heighten "signal"; what are potentially positive and negative consequences? 
  • Do any of the the visualizations help illustrate what you notice/assert regarding the text? Are some misleading? Confusing?
• Consider the value of the tool
  • 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?

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

Group 2 - nGram Viewer

Tips

• Any browser should work fine.
• Your exploration will begin here. NOTE: you may have to hit the blue "Search Lots of Books" button to bring in the visualization. 
• Help files for customizing the tool are at https://books.google.com/ngrams/info
• Discussion of underlying data is here.  
• Choose roles of recorder and presenter

As a group explore and discuss

• Spend some time exploring the notes about the underlying data.  What kind of text data is this? 
  
  • Is the text clean? Indexed? Filtered? Anything else interesting you note about the data?
• Explore the functions of the tool.  Attempt to make claims about the intellectual content of the text based on the tool and its visualizations. (Feel free to reach a little; definitely refine and make the input better.)
  
  • How comprehensive are these terms?  Can you make them more comprehensive by making them case insensitive?  What happens to your results?
  • Can you restrict the case of some phrases and make others case insensitive? How?
  • Can you segment by language to indicate data from Great Britain as distinct from US English?  What does it mean to find these terms in Spanish?
  • Can you add related terms?  Do these terms show interesting trending, either coincident or inverse? 
  • Add the coalesced term "(male+(chauvinism+chauvinist))".  Note the way the frequency of this form obliterates the other waveforms.  What can you do to temper this action? 
  • What sorts of supplemental data would be helpful in making sense of these visualizations?  
• Consider the value of the tool
  
  • 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?

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

Group 3 - Bookworm

Tips

• Any browser should work fine.
• Your exploration will begin here. If this doesn't render, open https://bookworm.htrc.illinois.edu/develop/, clear filtering, replace the two terms with "NOW" and "ERA", and run the search.
• Discussion of the use of the tool is at https://wiki.htrc.illinois.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=26705922 (the most helpful example is in the section "Inuit or Eskimo"
• (Extremely short) description of underlying data is here, and greater documentation here.
• Choose roles of recorder and presenter

Bringing it back together

• What sort of conclusions/suspicions can we draw from canned tools in general?
  • In what types or phases of projects would these tools be useful?
  • In what types or phases of projects would we need more control over analysis?