You have a collection of digital texts, now what? This workshop provides a gentle introduction to text analysis in the digital humanities using Voyant Tools, a collection of free web-based tools that can handle larger collections of texts, be they digitized novels, online news articles, twitter feeds, or other textual content. This workshop will be a hands-on, practical guide with lots of time to ask questions, so participants are encouraged to bring their own texts. In the workshop we will cover the following:
- A brief introduction to text analysis in the humanities;
- Preliminary exploration techniques using Voyant;
- Basic issues in choosing, compiling, and preparing a text corpus;
- Text mining to identify themes in large corpora;
- Ludic tools and speculative representations of texts; and
- Integrating tool results into digital scholarship.
This year’s workshop will pay special attention to certain multilingual issues in text analysis, such as character encoding, word segmentation, and available linguistic functionality for different languages. The instructors will present in English, but can also present or answer questions in French and Italian.
This is intended as an introduction to text analysis and visualization. We hope for an audience with a range of interests and relevant competencies. Participants are expected to bring their own laptop and are encouraged to bring their own texts.
