What makes a good DH project?

April 16, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

Digital Humanities is an exciting new field that allows people to make really interesting projects in the field of humanities. The possibilities of what you can do are endless, which is why I loved doing several projects and learning a few things about different tools. When you create a project however, I have learned these five important qualities a project should have in order to make it as best as it can be.

1) Your objective should be clear.

What is the purpose of this project? Before you even begin, you should be able to answer this question. This is very important because you need to know what you are trying to achieve. For my Google Ngrams project, my objective was to show the usage of “Evolution” and “Charles Darwin” during the Victorian Age, as well as demonstrate the different options that will affect your results when changing some of the options, and case-sensitivity. This was the purpose of this project.

2) Your information should be accurate and relevant.

Oops, I just remembered that during my Google Fusion Tables project I got a little off track (but that’s serves as a congratulatory for scrolling through all the photos) for posting a picture of a husky puppy, but the rest of the information is clear and accurate. The information about the vehicles on this long list (wasn’t too tedious) are describing what they are and their performance in terms of sales, which has been sourced from reliable websites to ensure accuracy. That way, it’ll make your project much more informative and it’ll make sense to the average reader who wants to learn a thing or two from it.

3) Design should be just right.

This is a little tricky, a boring design will make a project very uninteresting but if you go overboard with the colors and themes, than people will get distracted by the all the “shiny” bits and possibly not take the project seriously. With my word cloud project, the key is to try to aim for that “sweet spot” where your project is just the right design so it can be clearly read and nice to look at. The swan shaped word cloud from my word cloud project is in a cute swan shape and has several nice shades of blue to grab the reader’s attention, but is still in an easy to read font so the words are not hard to read. Did that word cloud hit the sweet spot? I think so.

4) It should be user-friendly.

I think this is very important, you really don’t want to frustrate the user don’t you? Good, so don’t be the creator of this site. Anyways back to the word cloud project, there were three sites that we were able to use to make the word clouds. I have used Tagxedo and Wordle. The one I didn’t use was Voyant. Tagxedo wasn’t the most user friendly but had great options for making word clouds. Wordle was very simple to use but limiting and Voyant was nearly the same as Wordle, but the opposite with most options. Basically, the user should not have to Google how to use ______ to use a project or software, in this day and age, most people should have this figured out.

5) Have fun!

No seriously, I mean it, is it really a bad thing if you don’t have fun while doing a project? Think about it, you’ll learn so much while doing your projects like I have with my Ngrams. When I noticed some trends with my results, I was able to learn a lot about Charles Darwin and Evolution during the time period that I saw an increase in the usage of this word. Plus when Darwin’s Theory of Evolution started to gain traction, I noticed that its usage has increased a lot, and you can also see why this is the case. Plus with my Fusion Tables, I loved doing research of the best selling cars of 2014 and seeing what cars Americans want and also learning why this is the case.

So how does DH let scholars ask new questions?

Many DH projects are shared freely and allow everyone to contribute. People will learn a lot from these projects and they will therefore think and perhaps question what they know. Since people usually collaborate on these projects, they will bring new perspectives to the table and ask questions about things that some people wouldn’t have known if they haven’t seen history or information in that new perspective.

Word Clouds: An Engineer’s Thumb

March 3, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford ~ 1 Comment

I’ll be honest, I have not heard of word clouds until a few days ago when we discussed them in class. I have seen them but, I thought they’re only a way of counting the amount of times a word appears in a text, but they’re more than that. They can reveal some overall themes of the text based on how frequently they occur. My story for example, had the word “German” appear several times, although this was to denote that fact that the characters Lysander and Elise are German. Also sometimes if the name of a place appears a few times, it could mean that it could play a minor role in the story. Watson at the time has a practice near Paddington Station and it is noted that Paddington is used as a reference several times in the story. Also engineer and hydraulics appear a few times as the victim, Victor Hatherley is a hydraulics engineer, showing some insight about a character’s life.

Now, there is some arguments against the use of word clouds, as explained by Jacob Harris of The New York Times. I agree to a certain extent that word clouds are considered to be a crude analysis of a speech, story, or other text but maybe people should not consider word clouds to be very informative. Now if they are well thought out and carefully crafted they can be somewhat useful as a learning aid, but you don’t really know how these words connect.

So to create these word clouds I have used two of the tools, the first one I used is Wordle. I found it very simple to use, except there is one major flaw. In order to get to one of the menus, I found myself having to click the word cloud itself before I can even open one of the menus. That’s a big demerit in my book as this is irritating and I was wondering if my touchpad was thinking the same. Once you get past that, Wordle is very straightforward and you can easily change the font, color and shape (though it’s very limited). You can call this the iPhone of word cloud generators since it’s does exactly what you need, except there’s a fatal flaw that drives you insane.

The second tool I used was Tagxedo, and I found its advanced options to be great. The official site says “Making word cloud is fun, and is much more fun with Tagxedo!” They are absolutely right, I had a lot of fun making the word clouds with this tool! The possibilities are endless! My word cloud is in the shape of a swan, which does make the cloud look nice. Obviously nothing is perfect as Tagxedo has a few flaws, first off, when you move your cursor over a word the small ones are still hard to read. Another flaw is that it didn’t work on Google Chrome (for me at least) and I had to use Safari. The last flaw was the fact that I couldn’t figure out how to change the colors, it only changed when you changed the theme. I do believe that there is a “pro” version that would allow the capabilities or maybe I just missed something. Still, I really enjoyed using Tagxedo and I think it is a great tool for making word clouds.

Creeping man

September 22, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

I wanted to experiment with both tools, so above you can see the Voyant and Wordle visuals for the Sherlock Holmes story “The Case of the Creeping Man”. Each tool has its pros and cons. I like how with voyant you can see all the statistics and data behind eat word on the actual webpage and the fact you can add more stop words to customize what words appear. I wish it gave you the option to change the color and font. With wordle it’s just about the opposite. You have the option to change colors and font (though it’s very limited) but it doesn’t show much data behind the words. I did figure out that if you right click on a word, for example I right clicked on ‘Sherlock’ and it gives you the option to delete the word. So for my visualization I removed Sherlock and Watson so it wouldn’t take away from other key words in the story.

The visualization aspect is helpful about each tool, but I find it really doesn’t offer much information about the plot of the story. If someone were to look at these word clouds without having read the story before hand they would only understand that the larger words are the ones that come up most often and maybe gather some information about who the characters are in the story and the areas the story is taking place. I think Voyant is definitely more helpful and pays more attention to detail and statistics of the words. It is also helpful that you can edit the stop words and create your own stop word list. There is a lot to take in with Voyant but it’s nice that everything is all in one place: the word cloud, the actual text of the story, and the graphs for each word. The fact that it shows the words in context with the text is also very helpful.

http://sherlockholmes_cases.tripod.com/creeping.htm

A Scandalous Bohemian Word Cloud

September 21, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

Before I created my own word cloud, I read the two blog posts regarding this visualization aid, and although one went more in depth about different websites where word clouds can be made, the blog “Word Clouds Considered Harmful” (well, the title says it all) had a very negative attitude toward these fun and light-hearted artistic creations. However, ironically enough, when I was searching for the definition of a word cloud in Google it came up as “An image composed of words used in a particular text or subject, in which the size of each word indicates its frequency or importance.” I found this interesting because in the negative post about word clouds Harris talks about how the size of a certain word should not emphasize the importance of it; but Google seems to think otherwise. Although I do not necessarily agree with Harris, I do believe that before people engage in making word clouds, they should read and understand the text that is being artistically manipulated. With this being said, more people would stray away from using only a word cloud to understand texts, and focus more on comparing their recent finds along with the finds of a visual aid.

Regardless of everyone’s opinions on word clouds and the significance in making them, I actually enjoyed customizing my word cloud for my favorite Sherlock Holmes story, A Scandal in Bohemia. At first I had trouble with Wordle (because of Java) and I decided to try Voyant. However, after seeing what my word cloud looked like with Voyant, I realized I was more of a Wordle fan. When I created my first word cloud with Voyant, many of the words that probably should have been emphasized, were not. For example, Holmes, Adler, and women were not even included in the word cloud. Secondly, I found that a lot of common words had the most emphasis and when I tried to take those out, it didn’t go as planned. Therefore, I tried Wordle again and after downloading Java, I copied and pasted my text and created the word cloud pictured below.

Here is my word cloud with my customized color palette and font. Do you think Holmes would be proud?

As I played around with Wordle, I found that I enjoyed being able to customize my visualization based on my preferences. As I kept clicking ‘randomize’, I gained insight on what shape I wanted my word cloud to be, the positioning of words, the color scheme, and the font. After it was all said and done, I chose to create my own color palette because I felt like the basic palettes were overused-so why not create my own? When I created my palette I chose dark colors so that words would clearly standout. My colors ranged from different shades of purple, a dark blue, a red wine, and a dark green, just because I found those most appealing. After choosing the specific colors I wanted, I chose to view the different fonts. After viewing various ones, I wound up using a font that made all the words neat and legible.

When I started to analyze my word cloud based on my prior knowledge from reading A Scandal in Bohemia, and understanding what word clouds are used for, I pretty much agreed with the words that mad most emphasis in the word cloud, versus the words that did not. For example, Holmes was obviously the most emphasized because he is a main character not only in this story, but also in all Sherlock Holmes stories (no pun intended). Another word that had emphasis was photograph. As readers know, a major theme in the story is the lost picture and is the main cause of stress for the king or ‘majesty’ (also emphasized), so it makes sense that it is one of the larger words. One thing that I did find interesting was how woman was not emphasized. I understand that ‘woman’ may not have been said a lot in the story, however it is a major representation of what Holmes thinks Adler to be and readers should know of regardless.

What did you all think of word clouds? Yay or nay?

Working with Word Clouds: Most Prominent Words in The Blue Carbuncle

September 21, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

I created a word cloud of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Blue Carbuncle using Voyant Tools. The site is easy to use and navigate, however I do wish that Voyant offered the option to change the colors, font, and orientation of the text as Wordle does.

In order to get an accurate depiction of The Blue Carbuncle, I removed stop words including mostly prepositions and conjunctions. Even after this, though, Holmes was still the most prominent word in the cloud, appearing a total of 39 times. While Holmes is the detective, I still felt that his name consumed so much space in the word cloud that it was difficult to actually grasp any of the main points of The Blue Carbuncle. I added his name to the list of stop words and then the word Hat then became most salient in the cloud, appearing 30 times! This was not shocking, considering that the hat helps Sherlock determine who ended up with the goose. Not surprisingly, the words goose, and bird both appear over 20 times, while stone appears 21 times. All of these words appear frequently because in the story, Holmes spends plenty of time trying to figure out how the stone ended up inside the goose.

What I liked most about my word cloud is that the characters’ names were quite visible. After I added all of the prepositions and conjunctions to the list of stop words, the names Baker (appears 18 times), and Peterson (11 times) became more outstanding. This is important because it reminds us of Mr. Baker purchasing the goose with the stone, and Mr. Peterson, who presented the case of the blue carbuncle to Holmes.

Overall, Voyant Tools made it simple to create a word cloud, but not one that is unique or visually appealing. As discussed in the Nieman Lab article we read this week, I do not think that Word Clouds have much purpose, unless you are trying only to observe word usage in a text. My word cloud displays the main characters and ideas of The Blue Carbuncle but you can’t make sense of what actually went on in the story unless you read it.

Scandal in Bohemia Word Cloud – Where’s Watson?

Image ~ September 20, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

Using the Voyant tool, I made a word cloud of Sherlock Holmes’s adventure, “Scandal in Bohemia.” It is unfortunate that the tool does not utilize color to distinguish word frequency or other significant word trends because that would have allowed for some interesting insights. In any case, the word size was telling enough to extract some Sherlockian observations about the context of the story. In my generated word cloud ( http://voyant-tools.org/tool/Cirrus/?corpus=1411164560979.4726&query=&stopList=1411165833459tu&docIndex=0&docId=d1411099477875.99b8b096-b231-7094-d527-8b986fefb364), the most to least significant elements of the story are apparent from larger to smaller size. ‘Holmes’ appears 47 times, ‘photograph’ appears 21 times, ‘king’ (17), ‘majesty’ (16), ‘irene’ and ‘adler’ (13), and ‘woman’ (12). It’s no surprise that these four aspects of the story surface most frequently and the the photograph can be considered a tertiary character of the story because it is crucial to the reveal and the idea of ‘the woman.’

What I took most note of, however, was the lack of Watson’s name. Holmes is obviously the largest word, front and center, but Watson is notably smaller and on the outskirts of the cloud. His name appears 6 times, half as many times as the mention of Irene Adler’s name. Though this does make sense because he is the narrator and therefore is primarily mentioned in the first person in the text, I expected to see more of his name when Sherlock addresses him in conversation. A conclusion from this ‘where’s Watson’ is that this is a subtle show of Sherlock’s narcissism. Holmes’s heightened perception and memory are arguably the biggest parts of the story, but his lack of addressing Watson – our narrator and the right hand man – by name is a way of noticing Sherlock’s ego from a quantitative perspective.

Digital Tools for the 21st Century

Sherlock Holmes's London

Word Clouds