{"id":1173,"date":"2019-10-30T10:59:09","date_gmt":"2019-10-30T10:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/?p=1173"},"modified":"2019-11-12T19:27:38","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T19:27:38","slug":"using-text-analysis-to-answer-real-world-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/extra\/using-text-analysis-to-answer-real-world-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Using Text Analysis to Answer Real World Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This afternoon I attended Laura Crossley\u2019s presentation \u201cText MiningDigital Humanities with API\u2019s, OpenRefine, and R\u201d <span id='easy-footnote-1-1173' class='easy-footnote-margin-adjust'><\/span><span class='easy-footnote'><a href='https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/extra\/using-text-analysis-to-answer-real-world-questions\/#easy-footnote-bottom-1-1173' title='  Crossley, Laura. \u201cText MiningDigital Humanities with API\u2019s, OpenRefine, and R\u201d. Fenwick Library. George Mason University. October 29 2019. Presentation.'><sup>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. When Laura started her presentation I was worried that I wouldn\u2019t understand much as I am pretty new to Digital Humanities. As a historian I am much more comfortable with centuries old paper than I am with any of the software she described. Her project was using <em>DHNow<\/em>, a digital publication originally intended as a case study for \u201cPressForward\u201d, and trying to describe its usefulness and its relevance to future digital humanities projects. She used <em>DHNow\u2019s<\/em> Editor\u2019s Choice blog as a corpus and was determining how much they are used currently. She noted that it\u2019s number of blog posts has dropped in recent years, but argues that it is still useful and worthwhile project.\u00a0 One of the larger questions Crossley was investigating was whether or not blogs in general could be considered a useful scholarly source, the issue being that over time links break and are no longer a valid pathway to the information in the blog, making citations increasingly difficult.\u00a0<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One really interesting aspect of her presentation was seeing the way that she used tools to analyze the DH Now corpus. During our lecture yesterday the Voyant tools were really intimidating. I was unsure of how this type of text analysis tool would be used in real world projects. I could understand it\u2019s usefulness in the scope of our assignment but not in a larger real world sense. Seeing this presentation changed that for me. Seeing the application of these tools to formulate questions was great. One thing that Crossley mentioned when she was discussing how she used topic models was that they are much better tool for forming questions- than for answering them. This was something that I missed when Professor Jess <span id='easy-footnote-2-1173' class='easy-footnote-margin-adjust'><\/span><span class='easy-footnote'><a href='https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/extra\/using-text-analysis-to-answer-real-world-questions\/#easy-footnote-bottom-2-1173' title=' Dauterive, Jessica. Text-Analysis. GMU. October 28, 2019. Lecture.'><sup>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>  was walking us through the different text analysis tools, so I was really glad that I attended the presentation. It was informative to see that these tools do more than make visually impressive word art. I was impressed with how she was able to use text mining tools to sift through mountains of data and find usable information for her investigation.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This afternoon I attended Laura Crossley\u2019s presentation \u201cText MiningDigital Humanities with API\u2019s, OpenRefine, and R\u201d . When Laura started her presentation I was worried that I wouldn\u2019t understand much as I am pretty new to Digital Humanities. As a historian I am much more comfortable with centuries old paper than I am with any of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/extra\/using-text-analysis-to-answer-real-world-questions\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Using Text Analysis to Answer Real World Questions&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-1173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-extra","tag-fall-2019"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1173"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1174,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions\/1174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}