“Next Steps in Text Mining” with John Laudun:
I attended John Laudun’s workshop on text mining on March 6. For the workshop, he lead our group on how to use Python programming language. We used the platform Anaconda in order to experiment with text mining. After doing our in-class exercise using Voyant, I was simultaneously a bit lost and impressed with the capabilities of using Python. Laudun walked us through a using Anaconda to text mine a corpus of Jane Austen’s major novels. It was interesting to see the different results and comparing them to the results from Voyant. He walked us through one example of the results, which laid out frequencies of words in Austen’s novels, but instead of displaying them as a word cloud, it displayed them in an arrangement where they appear in the text, which provided for context for each word by showing the words that appear around them. This provided a different context for the frequency of words in a corpus as opposed to only having them arranged in a graph or, again a word cloud like we played with in class on Voyant. I also was able to partially use this approach with Paul Laurence Dunbar and spoke to John after class and ended up emailing him about how to create a dataset from the Paul Laurence Dunbar digital archive at Wright State University. So helpful in multiple ways!
“Historical GIS Workshop: Mapping the Great Plains Population” with Geoff Cunfer:
I attended the Historical GIS Workshop on April 15. At the beginning of the workshop, Geoff Cunfer gave an excellent breakdown of what GIS is: “Geographic Information Systems,” which he defined as “computer based system for assembling, storing, manipulating, analyzing, and displaying data.” He walked everyone through the specifics of what constitutes GIS mapping programs and how they are assembled. He separated data into two separate types: map data and attribute data. He explained map data as “information about spatial location,” which is described in computer files by latitude-longitute on x-y coordinates. There are three separate map features: polygons, lines, and points. Attribute date is the information about place, for example population of countries (polygons), speed limits of roads (lines), and elevation of cities (points). In historical GIS, you use these methods to answer historical questions and to analyze historical sources. For the workshop portion, we used the program Arcmap to look at a map of the great plains regions — if I remember right, we looked at Minnesota. We played with the different functions of how to generate different population data when manipulating the data and were able to look for specific data about the population of the state based on different demographics at different points in history.
