Mike Widner's blog

Automated Textual Analysis in Revision

Screen shot of Voyeur display

I like to discover and play with digital humanities tools. One I recently discovered isĀ Voyeur, which creates word clouds and word frequency graphs for texts you provide it. Despite the warning by Jacob Harris thatĀ we should be wary of word clouds, they can serve as a gentle introduction to automated text analysis for students.

Poetry in Images

Photo of pile of word magnets

Students often have difficulty reading and interpreting poetry. It's an alien skill, it seems, for most of them. The challenge is even greater when there's a significant language barrier, such as trying to read Chaucer in Middle English. In my Banned Books course this semester, therefore, I had students collaboratively annotate passages from The Canterbury Tales with relevant images. This exercise would work, however, for any poem.

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All materials posted to this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. We invite you to use and remix these materials, but please give credit where credit is due. In addition, we encourage you to comment on your experiments with and adaptations of these plans so that others may benefit from your experiences.

 

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