What information did you choose to delete and keep? Why? For example, did you choose to delete or keep the table of contents?
I decided to remove dates, page numbers, titles, and subheading to get a clear reading of relevant topic information.
What stopwords did you choose and why? What was your thinking in terms of how they would impact your work in Voyant and your reading of the text?
I did not remove any of the stopwords because they were not pertinent to the topic of the document. Also, I wanted to get a full analysis of the document for my interpretation.
What Voyant tools did you find most helpful and relevant? Why? (Discuss at least three tools.)
I liked the Corpus tool because it created a visual of relevant key word use in the document. This can be helpful when searching a document for topic terms and topic information.
The context section is also helpful in searching a document for key elements or phrases for research purposes.
Summary tool is helpful in creating key words for your project or additional research.
What struck you most about what Voyant did or didn’t reveal? (Where you expecting to see something and didn’t? Was it what you expected? Etc.)
This is my first time using the voyant tool. However, it will be useful in creating project graphs and other visuals to explain project data.
What impact did your experience with Voyant have on your past reading and understanding of the text?
I think just knowing there is a tool of this caliber out there to assist in creating materials, visuals, and extracting data to assist with research is important as you move forward with other projects. With its capacity to review multiple documents at once, it will change how researchers review materials and connect information relevancy across different documents.
Based on what you see in Voyant, how might you read the text differently in the future, e.g., what else might you read or look for?
In the future, it may be useful to upload several documents to find connections in relevant information quicker, instead of reading each document individually.
Be critical of the tool. What are some of Voyant’s potential flaws and pitfalls? How might it be “misused”?
The stopwords feature could eliminate a word that is necessary to clarify the point of a particular key word that is relevant to your topic. For example, pronoun use may seem unimportant but may be needed to clarify who the article is referring to.
How does your experience working in Voyant related to or differ from the readings by Ryan Cordell and Brandon Walsh about “close reading” and “distant reading”? What did you learn from this distant reading of texts?
Close reading allows you to see all the information necessary to form an opinion. When you minimize the text, you may miss the entire meaning of the related text and misinterpret what it really important to the research. The use of distant research, applying computational methods to text, gives you limited text to interpret.
What does this approach reveal that other methods do not? Are there limitations to text mining?
While the voyant tool provides additional method for reviewing and analyzing text, it can skew the interpretive outcome if there is missing data that is needed to make informed decisions.
