blog 4 - eg

Information visualization is the topic of chapter 6 of the Digital Humanities Coursebook. Drucker discusses how to visual data through graphs in a way that makes viewers understand the data they are vieiwng. Drucker also provides a helpful checklist for visualizations, towards the end of chapter 6, that shows how individuals should prepare to visualize their data for presentation. 

Drucker discusses data mining in chapter 7, which is the process in which patterns are extracted from a work and then analyzed and examined by a computer. Using data mining processes, readers are able to extract and analyze literature and directly see correlations between words, sentence structure, and other literary devices. Drucker does state that literature is not data and goes on further to say that data mining (in regard to literature) should be used as an alternative form of close reading. Using digital extraction tools, readers are able to "distant read" works-- another topic mentioned by Drucker during this chapter.

Voyant is a tool I am familiar with, and using it in regard to the assigned readings for class shows just how important of a tool it is. Voyant is a data mining machine, created to extract and categorize data from a piece of literature, and aids in showing that "data" can be processed without making it overly difficult. For me, at least, seeing a piece of literature can be daunting when asked to analyze, so a tool like Voyant makes analyzing and processing literary devices much easier.

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow shows exactly why a tool like Voyant is so important. This website compiles the data mining topics of the assigned chapter, in addition to visualization aspects as well. the website shows different categories of emotions that people may have felt during the pandemic and finds the patterns within that, bringing it all together within one visualization. The visualization aspect also ties into distant reading topics, as viewers are able to view the data in a way that is ready for analysis.

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, however, shows how overwhelming data collection, mining, and visualization can be. The website, for me, was daunting at first and there were many ways to search, but frankly, I couldn't decipher what. I hope to learn more in regard to that website.

Comments

  1. BridgetSeptember 23, 2025 at 11:33 PM

    Using Voyant during class really helped me to better understand the differences between close and distance reading, and the way that data can be mined from literature. It's so interesting to be able to see themes of word usage and patterns in the author's writing! Specifically looking at the story The Nose, or our stories from Lucy Maud Montgomery, we can see the differences between writing styles of the different authors.

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