About this Workshop
As academic libraries continually shift to keep up with changing research and pedagogical needs, many are looking at the digital humanities as an opportunity for closer collaboration with faculty and other campus stakeholders. Text mining fosters a natural partnership between library staff, faculty and students by facilitating a research workflow that promotes close and distant reading, project management skills, and critical thinking.
The purpose of this workshop is to familiarize attendees with the basic workflow, terms and output a student or new researcher would encounter when trying to accomplish a text mining project. We will give an introduction to text mining, including: what it is, what’s possible, and how it is being used for research and instruction. In addition to a discussion on the theories and methodologies in the field, participants will get hands-on practice with the major components of a text mining project.
Participants will build mini-projects in order to familiarize themselves with the fundamental steps of text mining:
- the curation of a textual dataset,
- digital literacies and critical thinking skills,
- ideating, developing, and Interpreting research,
- the cleaning and preparation of that data,
- computational analysis, and visualization of results.
To accomplish these tasks, we will provide a sample dataset, but will also include a list of primary sources (found on the Web and in the library) where they could procure their own datasets. Using one of the most popular text mining and visualization tools used by digital humanists today (Voyant), attendees will work independently to generate visualizations from the texts in their datasets, and answer questions based on their results.
Course history
This workshop was first offered at the DLF conference in 2019, and has been adapted for a fully online/asynchronous format. We’d like to acknowledge the work of Dr. Wendy Perla Kurtz in developing the content, which also draws on a text-mining workshop offered by the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
This workshop is an introductory session covering the basics of text mining where no previous background is required.
Sources and Inspiration
- DHSI 2019 Introduction to Computation for Literary Criticism (Randa El Khatib and David Joseph Wrisley)
- DHSI 2019 Making Choices About Your Data (Paige Morgan and Yvonne Lam)
- Introduction to Text Analysis: Using Voyant to encounter new questions (UNLV workshop by Priscilla Finley & Chelsea Heinbach)
- Kleinman, S., LeBlanc, M.D., Drout, M., and Zhang, C. (2019). Lexos v3.2.0. https://github.com/WheatonCS/Lexos/
- Ryan Cordell and David Smith, Viral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines (2017), http://viraltexts.org
- Sinclair, Stéfan and Geoffrey Rockwell, 2016. Voyant Tools. Web. http://voyant-tools.org/
About your instructors
Sarah Ketchley is an Egyptologist and art history scholar in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilization at the University of Washington. She teaches introductory and graduate-level classes in digital humanities through NELC and Informatics, and directs a student DH internship program working to create digital editions of primary source material related to Nile travel in the 19th century. Sarah is also a Digital Humanities Specialist at Gale.
Lindsey Gervais is a Digital Learning Manager at Gale where she assists in the learning design and development of Gale’s Digital Scholarship Program. With a doctorate background and research recognition in the field of Cognition, Instruction, and Learning Technology, Lindsey is helping to elevate the instructional framework of Gale’s Digital Scholar Lab. She is a graduate of UCONN and taught Educational Psychology and Research Practicum for undergraduate and graduate students for 9 years.
Margaret Waligora is the product owner for the Gale Digital Scholar Lab. She holds a Masters in Library Information Science with a concentration in digital curation and preservation from Wayne State University. When she’s not in the office leading a project, she can be found taking long walks with her partner Lee and their two dogs (Walter and Charlie), volunteering for causes she is passionate about, listening to audiobooks in the comfort of her home, or catching up with friends.