As you know, your second Praxis Project is due next week at class time. All students have chosen this option, so we’ll have a nice cluster of projects to talk about. First, here’s the procedure with a few tips:

• read this overview of text-mining.
• choose a text or set of texts (you might start with a pre-prepped corpus like the CCC corpus we looked at earlier or the EEBO corpus Witmore co-created and discusses), and explore with Voyant, Google N-Gram, J-Stor Text Analyzer, Bookworm, MALLET, or another text-mining tool.
• Third, explore! Even more than with the mapping project, this can be an exercise in playing around with a tool or tools and reflecting on “what happens” rather than the production of some kind of finished “project”: if you don’t believe me, look at the blog posts from prior students below
• Fourth, blog about your experiences. Here are some examples to guide you from prior students in 700:

• Matt Rubin’s comparison of Voyant, N-Gram, and J-Stor Text Analyzer. The mapping of different folkloric beasts in N-Grams
• Kevin Pham’s comparison of the same text (Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks) in English and French, to analyze the work of translation.
• Amanda Filchock on relationships within Alcott’s Little Women (using Voyant) and on the intensity of interest in the novel over time (Ngrams).
• Brianna Casatt’s project on transcripts from TV’s Buffy: the Vampire Slayer and Faihaa Khan’s on the Harry Potter series: somewhat similar attempts to explore verbal relationships within a single fictional “world.”