RMeS Workshop and Public Lecture: Using Voyant for Exploratory Text Analysis with Professor Laura Mandell

Using Voyant for Exploratory Text Analysis

with Professor Laura Mandell (Texas A&M University)

Date: 15 April 2024
Time: 13.00-17.00 (see detailed programme below)
Venue: Utrecht University Library City Centre –  room 0.21, Drift 27, Utrecht
Credits: 1 ECTS
For: PhD Candidates, RMa students and staff members in Media Studies. PhD Candidates and RMa students should be a member of a Dutch Graduate Research School.
Registration: You can register for the workshop via THIS LINK. PhD Candidates and RMa students who register for the masterclass, are automatically registered for the public lecture.

For attendance public lecture only, you can register via THIS LINK.

Workshop:

In this workshop, I will show participants how to use Voyant Tools in order to investigate blogs, novels, and textual data of all kinds.

I will present two case studies using Voyant, an interface that gives humanities and social science researchers and students easy access to many digital methods for textual analysis and visualization. Using Voyant – especially its topic modeling, clustering, and keyword-in-context tools the first case study will investigate a novel by Sydney Owenson, the 19^th century Irish feminist novelist. Owenson’s use of orientalist clichés reveals the care she exerted in deploying each term. This will be followed by a second case study utilizing Native American and First Nations blogs from the United States and Canada helps us to understand local identities.

After this demonstration, participants will be walked through how to analyze their own texts or any set of documents available online or as pdfs, using Voyant Tools. Texts will be provided for those who do not bring their own.

Readinglist:

Will follow soon.

Students are advised to bring their laptop.

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Public lecture:

Exploratory Text Analysis: Innovative Possibilities for Humanities Research

Attacks on digital research have become rather infamous in humanities fields: “Computational Literary Studies,” “Cultural Analytics,” and “Distant Reading” have been vilified by historians, literary critics, and philosophers in academic books and prominent disciplinary journals, spilling over into the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education and The London Review of Books. From these critiques, we can gather that, for many humanists, digital textual analysis has become synonymous with a kind of quantitative reduction that eliminates ambiguity in the service of making broad and allegedly less biased generalizations about trends. In contrast, interpretive methodologies in literature, history, and philosophy often focus on exploring complexities in cultural materials, looking for their “biases” – or, one might say, their implicit world views.

The 1977 publication of Exploratory Data Analysis by mathematician John Tukey revealed that data visualization could move beyond description and inference to discovery, revolutionizing the field of statistics in a way much appreciated by mixed methods researchers in the social sciences. Here, I argue that the 2016 publication of Hermeneuti.ca by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair could potentially transform the humanities disciplines in much the same way. Exploratory textual analysis, I will call it, thanks to Tukey, can most profitably be used for discovery rather than generalization.

Rockwell and Sinclair’s digital platform Voyant Tools, an interface that gives researchers and students easy access to many digital methods for textual analysis and visualization without requiring programming skills, promotes discovery. Using tools for clustering, keyword-in-context, and visualizing word trends can uncover interpretive cruxes in novels, histories, film scripts and blogs, even those rife with stereotypes. Offering a few examples, I demonstrate that Voyant Tools can shed new light on old debates and suggest new avenues for future research.

• Katherine Bode, “What’s the Matter with Computational Literary Studies?” Critical Inquiry 49.4 (2023).
• Laura Mandell, “Reading Numbers,” Limits of the Numerical (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 2022).
  Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair, Hermeneutica (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
  —, Hermeneuti.ca and VoyantTools.org

Bio Note

Laura Mandell is Professor of English at Texas A&M University where she founded, and for 12 years directed, the Center of Digital Humanities Research. Selected as a Texas A&M Presidential Impact Fellow in 2017, she authored Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (2015), Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), and numerous articles. Her digital work includes the Digital New Variorum Shakespeare (newvariorumshakespeare.org), TypeWright (a crowd-sourced OCR correction tool available at 18thConnect.org), the Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application (bigdiva.org), and the Early Modern OCR Project (emop.tamu.edu). She is general editor of The Poetess Archive (poetessarchive.org) and founding director of the Advanced Research Consortium (ar-c.org).