Data Mining Our Blogs

As we make our way through digital humanities, we are learning many different tools that allow us to view our work of electronic literature in many abstract ways.  This week, we are learning about data mining.  Data mining allows us to read behind the lines of our electronic words, which reveals the frequency of our text, redundancy, etc.  The two main tools that we used were Voyant and Google Ngram Viewer, which were offered to us from Dr. Justus.  Voyant allows users to enter text into the program, where it then pulls the most frequently used words and creates a collage of words.  There are many different tools built into this program, one of which allows the viewer to watch the program draw a map of the words.  Google Ngram Viewer is a tool that shows the timeline of words within any given time frame.  This program is unique in the way that it shows how words such as 'virtual' and 'identity' have a direct correlation as well as their frequency of usage. While researching, using our first blog posts, "What is Digital Humanities?" we found some surprising information.

Based off of what we found from the results on Voyant, the Ngram tool has provided us with some insight on how some of the most popular terms have been used and have correlated historically. According to Ngram, the terms humanities and DH have peaked very little, if not at all. With DH being very situation dependent, there is no surprise there. there is only some activity on it around 1980. Human and culture, on the other hand, have shared a bit of popularity over the years. They both experienced a spike in use around the 1960's, which is around the hippy movement, when everyone really started to focus on the human movement. As humanity started to progress into the 2000's, both of the words have risen simultaneously, sharing almost the same slope for both of them.