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?
  • Propagation through tools
  • Stopwords
  • 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 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?

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. 
• 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?
• Do you feel you can make claims about the intellectual content of the text based on the visualization?  To what extent? (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?
  • Do any of the the visualizations help illustrate what you notice/assert regarding the text? Are some misleading? Confusing?
  • What sorts of supplemental data would be helpful in making sense of the visualizations?  
• Explore the functions of the tool and consider them critically.
  • How comprehensive are these terms?  Can you make them more comprehensive?
  • Can you add related terms?  Do these terms show interesting trending? 

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

Group 3 - Bookworm

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?