Here are my items:
http://holmesiana.net/items/show/126
http://holmesiana.net/items/show/135
http://holmesiana.net/items/show/105
Collection:
http://holmesiana.net/collections/show/27
Exhibit:
http://holmesiana.net/exhibits/show/drugabuse/drugabuse
sherlock
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous Sherlock Holmes stories. In the archive, I have included some of the various television and film adaptations that have been created recently.
Items:
DeFranco_What makes a good DH Project
Five qualities of a good DH project:
1. Aesthetically pleasing design. This is the first thing people notice when coming to a DH project. If a site is not designed appropriately to the content and in a way that makes sense to present the information, people will move on to another source.
2. Links to outside information. This allows people to further their research on the topic that your DH project covers. Like most of the sites we used in class, DH websites are often a starting place for research. Sometimes they only show a certain correlation or something and in order to make sense of it or find examples you need to use a more broad search website like Google. So this is an obvious way to have scholars ask questions. You’re using the information from the DH site to create a new or furthered study.
3. User friendly. This is one of the most important aspects of a DH project. It must allow the information to be found, easily accessed and organized in a way that lets you find what you need in an efficient timely manner. I think Locating London is the best example of this.
4. Appeals to a wide audience. This is is important in order to get people to use your site. If it’s limited to one tiny topic, not many people will be interested in viewing the site and it won’t be a valuable resource to many people. My example of this is the London Gallery Project. The only people that would find this site informative would be people interested in the progression of art galleries and even then only one set of information is shown.
5. Sources. It’s very important to site where you get your information form when creating a good DH project.
DeFranco_Topic Modeling Assignment
Iterations: 2000
Number of Topic Words: 15
Number of Topics:150
Body/Posture: face eyes turned caught stood looked sunk glimpse mouth staring breast sat chin sight covered
Attack: man found dead body blood knife struck blow weapon fell wound stick head picked wounded
Family/Household: family england people real year high children live friends folk history shows household governess gather
Writing a Letter: paper read note written wrote handed sheet letter writing post write slip pen tossed printed
Neighborhood: house passed garden door walk gate lane cottage walking park windows dark grounds road knocked
Clothing/Wardrobe: black coat dressed hat st clair broad cap wore dress collar den eye trousers coloured
Thought: mind clear idea make remember observed vague effort easily forced absurd draw suspected memory false
Marriage: woman wife husband love life loved knew married girl women nature marriage marry power lover
Word Cloud Assignment_DeFranco
The first word cloud tool I used was Voyant. I liked this site because it let me customize how I wanted my word cloud to look down the the word. I like that there were adjustable settings that gave you the chance to decide what you want to emphasize and what you want to be smaller or even not show up at all. This would be a good tool for a company that wanted to use interesting graphics to further a brand or for name recognition. It is colorful and dynamic and lets you include an unlimited amount of text and chooses the most common words but lets you call the shots afterwards. I do wish, however that there were more design customization options. I would like to chose the colors to match the theme I’m working with. For example I might make this particular word cloud grey 50 shades of grey (no pun intended) because black and white alludes to the time period.
I have to say that I had a really hard time getting either of the two programs to work on my computer. They both required me to install additional programs on my laptop that when I tried to, completely froze up everything to the point where I had to manually restart my computer. Twice. And I fought with there programs for almost an hour. So rather than risking breaking my laptop I’m supplementing another word cloud program that I learned because it’s the one we use for our campus’s online alternative magazine, The Little Rebellion, for which I am a contributing editor. It’s quick, simple, and very user friendly. Again there are not many customization tools but it makes a clean rectangular image and you can customize the font with any typeface from the Microsoft Word suite. We use these word clouds as backgrounds for other things–lower the opacity and there ya go.
Word Cloud: A Scandal in Bohemia
I have in the past used Wordle to create a word cloud for a school project so I had no trouble with that site but I did have issues using Voyant and could not get it to delete additional stop words beyond what were in the dictionary for the English option.
I think the Wordle word cloud makes it easier to understand the story because more of the stop words were not on it. You can clearly tell from both clouds that Holmes is the key component in the story. Additionally, “photograph” is one of the largest words in both clouds, it actually appears to be the second largest in the Wordle word cloud. This tells you that the main focus of the story is about a photograph which is important because that is exactly what Holmes is trying to retrieve throughout the tale. The words King, Majesty, and woman/Irene are also clearly visible. Irene is very important in the story not only because she is originally who Holmes is searching for but also because she changes Holmes’ view on woman in general. King and Majesty appearing larger tells one that the story is about a case that entails some sort of royalty. Some words that are larger that do not play main roles in the plot are door, one, must, said, minutes, house, face, and hand. These words though not stop words per-say do not pertain to the plot in a way that one can understand through the word cloud. This is a huge con of using a word cloud- that unimportant words are shown and can throw off the plot of the story. Words like that can make it more difficult to understand what the tale is about. A huge pro though is the complete opposite and that is being able to get the general idea of a story in just a glance. One can view a word cloud and get an overview of important parts or more of words within a story. Overall, I think word clouds are visually appealing but not that helpful in this instance.
Topic Modeling
60 topics, 1500 iterations, 25 topic words printed:
Topic: Household
years time ago week married family marriage thirty months live year age engaged twenty daughter situation lives carruthers living meet history month youth happy woodley
Topic: Emotions
good ah put word deal suppose feel don glad means thing laughed leave true mine takes kind heavens anger service fortune bye lead mistaken detail
Topic: Travel
train station carriage reached walk doubt gave start hotel passed town follow journey reach spoke bridge observed late catch started ready rapidly green cross hurried
Topic: Characterization
black eyes white hair face blue red dress heavy brown coat side mouth grey centre pair nose drawn thick hat forehead yellow broad faced suit
Topic: Dawn
morning day close full found visit absolutely country hat set change spent bird lie attention reading evil people nature acquaintance excitement town goose received drawn
Topic: Anecdotal
interest cases arthur friend sherlock public remarkable adventure problem present strange doyle case conan facts curious singular experience narrative details notes record long interesting events
Topic: Effeminate
lady wife woman maid left difficulty ferguson life girl mistress couple difficult forever nurse half devoted frances ill dear frightened coffin beautiful show longer notice
50 topics, 2000 iterations, 50 topic words printed:
Topic: Calligraphy
paper note read book table pocket papers hand short handed hopkins attention writing sheet post show eye rough slip drew baron page stanley pen pencil simply tossed held printed scribbled initials finished tea leaves worth volume desk knee added column reading trust pages folded excellent aloud arrange notebook torn gruner
Topic: Masculinity
father man time heard son young returned hudson mother mccarthy ship witness sea alive made peter game left boat captain estate cry trevor long quarrel carey dozen coroner return lay call turner concerned keeper warning word gun board jury farm rat hatherley securities sailor voyage considerably tale boscombe hearing seaman
Topic: Fright
light window dark suddenly looked coming round lamp black shadow spoke figure darkness stood corner empty heels moved silent moving shining whispered thrown emerged lantern yellow sudden sprang dashed low bushes ears watched vanished dim glancing half horrible bent gave band bar fear metal excitement burning deserted shone gleam flash
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
Jacob Harris of the New York Times writes in his article titled “Word Clouds Considered Harmful” that “visualization is reporting” and goes on to say visualizations should “…pare away extraneous information to find a story in the data…to help the reader understand the basics of the subject…” For many reasons I find these expectations especially hard to satisfy with word clouds. Not so much because they contain extraneous information but rather information that only just begins to lend itself to comprehensively conceptualizing a story. The data is comprised of individual words which in many ways are significant to the tale, but does nothing to elaborate on how they relate to tell the story. This lack of conceptual depth can easily lead the interpreter of the visual to invalid conclusions. Harris also adds a helpful bit of advice to anyone interested in creating data analysis visualizations when he claims “Prettiness is a bonus; if it obliterates the ability to read the story of the visualization, it’s not worth adding”
Considering all of the aforementioned, when deciding which program to use for visualizing a contextual analysis of Aurthur Doyle’s The Adventure of the Speckled Band, I based my decision on an incentive to analyze the text as practically as possible. Therefore I chose to sacrifice the customizable aesthetics of wordle for the more customizable analysis offered by voyant.
The trade off, initially inclined to improve the effectiveness of the analysis, did little to enhance an understanding of the story for any potential reader. For someone who has never read the story there are ceaseless misconceptions this cloud could beget. For instance one with no prior exposure to the story might see the words “died” and “watson” of similar size and perhaps infer that Watson meets his fate or even “holmes” considering his name is also a part of the cloud. These words present the subjects and topics that arise in the story but give no insight as to how they collectively form conflicts/resolutions or characters and setting which without any prior knowledge of the tale makes them near useless. Analogously like being given only a few of the most abundant ingredients in a recipe without other vital ingredients and instructions on how to mix them to make the desired end product. The most practical application for this word cloud, although no groundbreaking achievement, would be to highlight significant themes to reference for someone who already read The Adventure of the Speckled Band and knows how those themes actualize the story.