Class 7 (English 197 – Fall 2022)

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Class Business

Practicum 3: Text Analysis Exercise

Student outputs

Roberto Busa, S.J., Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Roberto Busa, S.J. and the origin of text analysis. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Index Thomasticus site (screenshot), https://www.corpusthomisticum.org/it/index.age
Index Thomasticus site (screenshot).
Original concordance produced 1949-1970s, 56 printed volumes.

Related Text Analysis Tools

Text Analysis

arrowhead-right-black-small Alan’s slides on relaton between text-encoding and text-anaylsis (using Yin Liu’s table of paradigms of text in “Ways of Reading, Models for Text, and the Usefulness of Dead People”)

Slides comparing text encoding and text analysis from Alan Liu's English 25 course (using Yin Liu's table) (screenshot from slides)

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arrowhead-right-black-small Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method” (2012)

Ryan Heuser & Long Le-Khac,
Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlet #4 (Other Stanford Literary Lab pamphlets)

Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method” (2012) -- (p. 8)

Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method” (2012) -- Figure 5 (p. 14)
Figure 5 (p. 14)
Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method” (2012) -- (p. 20)
(p. 20)
Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method” (2012) -- Figure 15 (p. 27)
Figure 15 (p. 27)
Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method” (2012) -- Figure 18 (p. 32)
Figure 18 (p. 32)
Annotated quotation from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations in Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method” (2012) -- (pp. 37-38)
Annotated quotation from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method” (2012) — (pp. 37-38)

The general methodological problem of the digital humanities can be bluntly stated: How do we get from numbers to meaning?… In our research we’ve found it useful to think about this problem through two central terms: signal and concept. We define a signal as the behavior of the feature actually being tracked and analyzed. The signal could be any number of things that are readily tracked computationally…. A concept, on the other hand, is the phenomenon that we take a signal to stand for, or the phenomenon we take the signal to reveal. It’s always the concept that really matters to us. (Postscript)

Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (home screen of the online version)
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (home screen of the online version)
Marc Alexander’s tree- map visualization of present-day English in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Each dot represents a word, and the shade of the dot corresponds to when the word entered the language (darker dots show earlier words). Words are arranged by semantic proximity as indicated in the labels. (In Alan Liu, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” PMLA 128, no. 2 (2013): p. 418
Marc Alexander’s tree- map visualization of present-day English in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Each dot represents a word, and the shade of the dot corresponds to when the word entered the language (darker dots show earlier words). Words are arranged by semantic proximity as indicated in the labels. (In Alan Liu, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” PMLA 128, no. 2 (2013): p. 418

General interpretive method of text analysis

Text analysis interpretive workflow (slide 7) (Alan Liu)
Text analysis interpretive workflow

Discussion of Text Analysis (continued)

arrowhead-right-black-small Richard Jean So & Edwin Roland, “Race and Distant Reading” (2020)

Richard Jean So and Edwin Roland, “Race and Distant Reading” (2020) -- Figure 1, p. 67
Richard Jean So and Edwin Roland, “Race and Distant Reading” (2020) — Figure 1, p. 67.

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Indeed, the goal of this essay is to begin the hard work of developing a critical version of distant reading appropriate for the analysis of race and racial discourse in literature. We envision a reflexive method that is able to identify its own elisions while also pointing to new insights and opportunities for research.(72)

Richard Jean So, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2020)


cover of Richard Jean So, Redlining Culture

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