Section Overview - Explore DH Methods
This section will introduce you concepts and tools around text analysis and topic modeling. You will use these tools to explore and visualize two bodies of historical text: 20th century State of the Union Address and Party Platforms.
You may find evidence in these activities and visualizations that supports your essay research topic; to this end, the modules in this section will also teach you to incorporate these visualizations into your multimedia essay, just as you have been doing with primary source images and documents.
A Note on Viewing State of the Union and Party Platform full text:
Throughout the exercises in this section, you’ll be viewing historical text at large scale, using distant reading methods. However, there may also be times when you want to delve deeper into the texts themselves. Your project website comes complete with links to the full text of every State of the Union Address and Party Platform created in the 20th century. Find these links by first locating and clicking on the “Data” tab in your site’s navigation menu, then using the “Search” box at the top right of the table to filter by president, candidate, or year. When you click on a documents’s link, it will take you to the full text hosted by the University of California Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project.
Goals:
- Explore examples of Digital Humanities projects
- Gain familiarity with concepts of Digital Humanities/Digital History, text as data, text analysis, and topic modeling
- Explore a corpus of text in Voyant
- Use the Cirrus, Trends, and Context visualizations to make some observations about each corpus
- Export a Voyant Tools visualization as a png file
- Name topics
- View topic visualizations
- Add a topic graph to essay
Estimated Time to Complete: 1 hour and 40 minutes