Week Three: New Analytical Approaches to the Corpus

Day 11: Monday, 22 July 2013

Visualization Case Study: “Visualizing English Print”

Morning (9:30 to 11:30): Jonathan Hope discusses how visualization analysis provides a tool that offers serious inroads into scholarly data using new techniques and how it can allow scholars to investigate rather than simply view data. His case study will involve the work of the “Visualizing English Print” project, a major Mellon-funded initiative coordinated by scholars at the Folger, the University Wisconsin at Madison, and the University of Strathclyde. Its team seeks to develop tools and protocols that enable researchers to analyze and visualize the data being made available as part of the Text Creation Partnership through EEBO and other archives.

Lunch Break (11:30 to 1:00)

Afternoon (1:00 to 3:00): Discussion continues as Dr. Hope demonstrates the analysis and visualization tools being developed by the VEP project team, including the comparative rhetorical analysis using Docuscope, which allows scholars to trace the development of genres and modes of discourse through time. There will be an opportunity to run Docuscope and the tools developed by the VEP team. His presentation will culminate with a discussion of the mathematics of comparison: the “spaces” in which scholars project texts in order to compare them.

Post-Tea (3:30 to 4:30): Participants continue discussion.

Day 12: Tuesday, 23 July 2013

Semantics and the Digital Humanities

Morning (9:30 to 11:30): Marc Alexander (University of Glasgow) will lead discussion on through an introduction and demonstration to the Thesaurus of English (HTOED). This session will discuss the possibilities provided by HTOED, by looking at the English language as a whole, and through a narrower exploration of the ways early modern semantic fields change, for instance, for the words meaning man and woman.

Lunch Break (11:30 to 1:00)

Scholarly Investigation through Visualization Tools

Afternoon (1:00 to 3:00): Dr. Alexander will shift to a discussion of visualization methods and their appropriateness to certain types of projects. A semantic arrangement of information about text (rather than, say, an alphabetical organization) lends itself to techniques of displaying and clustering data visually. The participants will compare ways of visualizing data provided from HTOED using the University of Maryland’s [1] software and discuss the [2] tagger available from Lancaster University. He will invite the participants to suggest applications that are relevant to their research goals.

Post-Tea (3:30 to 4:30): Participants divide into sub-groups to conduct HTOED searches relevant to their interests.

Assignment: Participants to familiarize themselves with the USAS tagger and Treemap and Docuscope software.

Day 13: Wednesday, 24 July 2013

Morning (9:30 to 11:30): Participants break into their sub-groups to consider what kinds of projects are best represented with visualization software and for what type of audience. Professor Hope and Dr. Alexander will circulate through the sub-groups.

Lunch Break (11:30 to 1:00)

Evaluating Visualization and Visualization Tools and Participant Presentations

Afternoon (1:00 to 3:00): Professor Hope and Dr. Alexander will guide discussion on how the methods and tools used for the visualization projects to which they have been introduced might be amenable to participants’ own work. Discussion will involve how scholars develop the ability to read, interpret, and evaluate visualizations, and the importance of understanding the statistical procedures that lie behind visual representations.

Post-Tea (3:30 to 4:30): Participants prepare their reports describing their future DH plans and contributions to the continuing Institute digital footprint.

Day 14: Thursday, 25 July 2013

Participant Reports

Morning (9:30 to 11:30): Participants prepare their reports describing their future DH plans and contributions to the Institute website.

Lunch Break (11:30 to 1:00)

Afternoon (1:00 to 3:00): Six participants deliver reports on the themes of the institute and lay out plans and issues for their future research. In ten-minute reports, followed by five minutes of questions, they will discuss what they have learned, speculate on what needs to be done or made available to researchers in the field, and describe what they have been inspired to investigate. They will also indicate what their continuing contribution to the Institute’s digital footprint will be.

Post-Tea (3:30 to 4:30): Two additional participants present reports.

Day 15: Friday, 26 July 2013

Participant Reports

Morning (9:30 to 11:30): Six additional participants present reports.

Lunch Break (11:30 to 1:00)

Afternoon (1:00 to 3:00): Six additional participants present reports.

Post-Tea (3:30 to 4:30): Director leads the final discussion of the three weeks. These culminating discussions mark the beginning of the work participants will continue after the Institute.