Hello Dr. Appleford,
Sorry I just realized I’m very very late with this blog post. I think I was just so wrapped up with my senior presentation that I completely forgot to do anything else. I hope that late posts can still get partial credit.
I also realize now that I didn’t turn in another blog post somewhat earlier in the semester. I apologize again and I’ll try to answer all of those questions in this one post.
Blog Post #8: Post your best visualizations from Voyant. What did you learn from this distant reading of texts? How might this approach contribute to your final project? In what ways can we use such tools to analyze historical information? What sort of insights can we anticipate? Are there limitations in the tool that stand out to you?
Unfortunately, I wasn’t really able to use Voyant very well with the texts that I utilized for my project. They were not proofed after being scanned with a simple PDF to text software (and some didn’t even have that). Since this was the case, Voyant wasn’t able to filter out any of the “filler” words, and my text bubbles and connections were full of nonsense words like “Id”, “com”, “Co3”, and “COO”. If the process had been effective, it might have been an interesting experiment to test how frequently terms like “manmade”, “anthropogenic”, “greenhouse” and more were used over to to see if they correlated with any major developments. Text analysis helps save a ton of time when it comes to historical analysis of language, and could potentially be used to track the spread of ideas around groups. It would be interesting to discover where certain words (appear to have) originated. For example, we know William Shakespeare invented several words, and it would be interesting to discover the first published use of others. Some limitations I can see include the text needing to be available online and proofed, meaning that a lot of people would need to commit a lot of time to make this work. Another limitation is, of course, copyright. Money is quite the incentive, and it seems doubtful that corporations would be willing to sacrifice profit for the betterment of society as a whole (which is exactly what my project has been about).
Blog Post #11: Discuss your progress on your project to date. What is your project? What tools and technologies are you using and why? What issues are you having with your project and how have you overcome them?
This project has been less of an assignment than a passion project for me at this point. I would say that, conservatively, I have spent at least 80 hours researching and writing about this topic this semester. I have never found a research topic so interesting. After I read about the pirate story, I went down a rabbit hole and found myself in the Parisian Catacombs. It was surreal to discover how frequently certain people and entities looped back on themselves, winding and veering like a rollercoaster. The technology I am using to display my work is fairly rudimentary, but I think that the fascinating nature of the topic is enough to hold readers’ attention. The most difficult issue I faced was uploading a copy of my video presentation onto wordpress. In the end I had to download the bluecast as a podcast (which bizarrely requires logging onto the panopto site outside of blueline), compressing the video with Handshake, and then uploading it. Again I just wanted to thank you for all your help with that.
Matthew Morton's Blog 