├── _config.yml ├── keyword.id.jpg ├── stopword.edit.jpg ├── terms.options.jpg ├── voyanthelp.md ├── stopword.md ├── other.md ├── index.md ├── study.md ├── share.md ├── etexts.md ├── sheetAndXML.md └── intro.md /_config.yml: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | theme: jekyll-theme-tactile -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /keyword.id.jpg: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sgsinclair/dialogica/master/keyword.id.jpg -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /stopword.edit.jpg: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sgsinclair/dialogica/master/stopword.edit.jpg -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /terms.options.jpg: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sgsinclair/dialogica/master/terms.options.jpg -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /voyanthelp.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Voyant Help Files 2 | 3 | Welcome to the Voyant Help Files. These are short pages designed to show you how to do things in Voyant. We will be developing them as people ask us questions. Feel free to send us tricks you have learned or ask us questions. 4 | 5 | ### Editing Stopword and White Lists 6 | In Voyant tools like Cirrus, Terms, and Links you can edit the Stopword list that is used to exclude words. There is also a White word List feature if you want to limit the words used. Learn more with our [Stopword and White List Help File](/stopword.md). 7 | 8 | ---- 9 | 10 | [Dialogica Home](/index.md) 11 | 12 | ---- 13 | 14 | © Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell 15 | 16 | All materials on this site shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 17 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /stopword.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Stopword and White List Help File 2 | 3 | Voyants uses a Stopword list in most tools to control what words you see. The list of words in the Stopword list are words that appear frequently like "the" and "and", but which we often are not interested in (unless studying such function words.) By default it is set to Auto-detect which detects the language you are using and, if we have a stopword list in that language, uses it. That means that in the Cirrus word cloud, for example, you don't see the most common words that are in the list. To choose or edit the list used do the following: 4 | 5 | Options Panel 6 | 7 | 8 | 1. Select the **Options panel** in the tool you want to affect. (You can set them globally too!) 9 | 2. Click on the menu where it says "Auto-detect". That will give you choices if you want to force Voyant to use a language. Alternatively you can enter the ID of an edited stopword list right in the field instead of "Auto-detect". 10 | 3. If you want to Edit the list then click the **Edit** button next to the field/menu. That will open this **Edit Stoplist** panel: 11 | 12 | Options Panel 13 | 14 | 4. To edit the list, just delete words or type them in. Then press **Save**. 15 | 5. Note that you will now see a custom ID for the Stopword list in the Options panel. If you want to reuse this edited list in another Voyant session you should click on the ID and copy it so you can save it somewhere. 16 | 17 | Options Panel 18 | 19 | **Note:** When you choose or edit the Stopword list you can also select to **apply globally** your edits. That means that the edited list is used in any tool where it makes sense. In some cases you may just want to keep the edited list local. 20 | 21 | ## White List 22 | 23 | Voyant also allows you to specify **White List** of words which is the opposite of a stopword list. A White List is a list of words which you want to limit Voyant's visualization to. If you edit and save a White List then visualizations like the Cirrus word cloud will only show words on that list and no others. This can be a way of producing a visualization of specific words. Of course, other settings may mean that words in your White List don't show up. For example, if you limit the number of terms displayed to fewer than you have in your list. 24 | 25 | ## Help for Stopwords 26 | 27 | More help is available [here for Stopwords](https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/stopwords). 28 | 29 | ---- 30 | 31 | [Dialogica Home](/index.md) | [Voyant Help Files](/voyanthelp.md) 32 | 33 | ---- 34 | 35 | © Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell 36 | 37 | All materials on this site shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 38 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /other.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Other courses and useful links 2 | 3 | Here we offer a curated list of other online course materials that can be used to develop text analysis modules for online learning. Some of these are tutorials that we have developed and some are from others. Feel free to mix and match. 4 | 5 | 1. Other courses and tutorials 6 | 1. Useful text analysis links 7 | 8 | ---- 9 | ## Other courses and tutorials 10 | 11 | * [Voyant Gallery: Examples of Voyant in Teaching](https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/gallery-section-examples-of-voyant-in-teaching) is a set of links to materials others have put up from example student blog posts to syllabi. 12 | * [The Art of Literary Text Analysis](https://github.com/sgsinclair/alta/blob/master/ipynb/ArtOfLiteraryTextAnalysis.ipynb) is a full course on doing text analysis with Python by us, Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell. It is composed of a set of IPython notebooks that show you how to use IPython notebooks to do text analysis. 13 | * [The Programming Historian](https://programminghistorian.org/) is a set of peer-reviewed tutorials on all sorts of digital humanities subjects. The [list of English lessons are here](https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/); there are also lessons in French and Spanish. Many of the lessons deal with text acquisition, management and analysis processes. 14 | * The [#dariahTeach](https://teach.dariah.eu/) Working Goup have been develop high-quality courses and materials for teaching the digital humanities that are open and reusable in different ways. They have a [YouTube channel with playlists](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCScSbG7XjiXbZVgilEp0Pkw/playlists) of open video materials. You can even see a contribution we made on [DH in Practice: Visualizing Text](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uamyLcWtECg). 15 | * The Data-Sitters Club [Voyant's Big Day](https://datasittersclub.github.io/site/dsc6/) is a chapter by Katherine Bowers in their collaborative book that looks closely at using Voyant. Very useful tour of what you can do. At the end it includes personal memories from the club members of Stéfan Sinclair. 16 | 17 | ---- 18 | ## Useful text analysis links 19 | 20 | * [Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR)](http://tapor.ca) is a registry of text analysis and digital humanities tools. You can discover tools that might help your research. TAPoR also has lists of convenient tools. 21 | * [The Journal of Cultural Analytics (CA)](https://culturalanalytics.org/) is a journal devoted to the computational study of culture with excellent articles illustrating and discussing how text analysis methods can be used. CA includes a section of edited and [reviewed datasets](https://culturalanalytics.org/section/1579-data-sets). 22 | * [Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/) is a collection of electronic texts that can be used in research and teaching. These are not always edited by scholars so be careful to check what you use. None the less, there is a critical mass of texts on Gutenberg. 23 | * [Women Writers Project](https://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/) is making pre-Victorian women writers accessible for research and learning. 24 | 25 | ---- 26 | 27 | [Dialogica Home](/index.md) | [Previous: Introduction](/intro.md) 28 | 29 | ---- 30 | 31 | © Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell 32 | 33 | All materials on this site shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 34 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /index.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ## Welcome to Dialogica: Thinking-Through Voyant! 2 | *Dialogica: Thinking-Through Voyant* (DTTV) is a textbook for learning computer-assisted text analysis with [Voyant](https://voyant-tools.org) and [Spyral](https://voyant-tools.org/spyral/). It complements our book [Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities](http://hermeneuti.ca) (MIT Press, 2016). 3 | 4 | *Dialogica* was developed by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair in early 2020 to help those pivoting to online learning. We continue to add to it in [memory of Stéfan](https://csdh-schn.org/stefan-sinclair-in-memoriam-2/) who passed away in August, 2020. 5 | 6 | --- 7 | 8 | Do you need online teaching ideas and materials? Dialogica was supposed to be a text book, but instead we are adapting it for use in online learning and self-study. It is shared here under a CC BY 4.0 license so you can adapt as needed. 9 | 10 | --- 11 | 12 | Do you have a tutorial for Voyant you would like to adapt to *Dialogica*? Would you like to contribute? Send links and thoughts to Geoffrey Rockwell (grockwel at ualberta dot ca). 13 | 14 | ---- 15 | 16 | ## Contents 17 | 18 | 0. [Introduction](/intro.md): What is Dialogica? What is our pedagogical philosophy and our model for using these? 19 | 20 | [Play an introductory video welcoming you to Voyant](https://youtu.be/nwzQ2sxhPKo) 21 | 22 | 1. [E-Texts and Analysis](/etexts.md): Introducing Voyant and text analysis. 23 | 24 | Download: [Walkthrough 1: What is an electronic text and how can we study it?](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1a2VRBO_vULjZ7t5t2DA8wMN0hQNC18zw) 25 | 26 | 2. [Studying a Text](/study.md): How to prepare a text and explore it. 27 | 28 | Download: [Walkthrough 2: Studying a Text](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1a2VRBO_vULjZ7t5t2DA8wMN0hQNC18zw) 29 | 30 | 3. [Sharing Results: Exporting and Embedding](/share.md): How to share interactive Voyant panels in an online paper. 31 | 32 | Download: [Walkthrough 3: Sharing Results: Exporting and Embedding](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1a2VRBO_vULjZ7t5t2DA8wMN0hQNC18zw) 33 | 34 | 4. [Managing Corpora with Spreadsheets or XML](sheetAndXML.md): How to use either spreadsheets or XML to manage a collection of documents. 35 | 36 | Download: [Walkthrough 4: Managing Corpora with Spreadhseets and XML](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1a2VRBO_vULjZ7t5t2DA8wMN0hQNC18zw) 37 | 38 | 5. Exploring a Corpus with Text Mining Tools: How to use text mining tools to develop conjectures about a collection. 39 | 40 | Download: [Walkthrough 5: Exploring A Text](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1a2VRBO_vULjZ7t5t2DA8wMN0hQNC18zw) 41 | 42 | 6. Salient Words: How to use the Visualizations, Corpus Terms and Document Terms tools to see what words stand out. 43 | 44 | Download: [Walkthrough 7: Salient Words](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1a2VRBO_vULjZ7t5t2DA8wMN0hQNC18zw) 45 | 46 | 2. [The Voyant Help Files](/voyanthelp.md) is a collection of short help files that show things you can do with Voyant. 47 | 48 | 4. [Other courses and useful links](/other.md) 49 | 50 | 1. Other chapters planned: 51 | 52 | Following a theme through a text, The arc of a project, Clustering and comparing texts, The next step: introduction to Spryal 53 | 54 | 55 | ---- 56 | 57 | [Dialogica Home](/index.md) | [Next: Introduction](/intro.md) 58 | 59 | ---- 60 | © Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell 61 | 62 | All materials on this site shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 63 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /study.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Studying a Text: How to Prepare a Text and Explore It: Teaching Guide 2 | 3 | **Note**: This page is a **teaching guide** with advice for using [Walkthrough 2: Studying a Text: The Arc of a Project](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1a2VRBO_vULjZ7t5t2DA8wMN0hQNC18zw) (Downloadable MS Word file). 4 | 5 | **Also**: Our general teaching philosophy is available in the [Introduction](/intro.md). Feel free to skip this Teaching Guide and just read and adapt the Walkthrough. It is shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) so you can do what you want. 6 | 7 | ## About Walkthrough 2 8 | 9 | The second walkthrough is designed to take students through a simple project to give them a sense of the arc of a project from finding a text to reporting about it. 10 | 11 | ### Objectives 12 | 13 | The objectives of this walkthrough are to get students to the point where they can: 14 | 15 | - Find or create an electronic text suitable for uploading to Voyant 16 | - Develop questions and hypotheses about a text suitable for text analysis 17 | - Study the text in Voyant 18 | - Save visualizations for a report on the study 19 | 20 | ### Discussion 21 | 22 | This walkthrough takes students through a simple project where they pick a text, upload it, study it and then report on it. Some general thoughts: 23 | 24 | - If your class is large and they are all hitting the Voyant server at the same time you may want to encourage students to download and run Voyant locally. See instructions at https://digihum.mcgill.ca/voyant/resources/run-your-own/voyant-server/ 25 | - Some students may not understand what a plain text file is. You may want to emphasize the difference between a Word file and plain text. 26 | - Many students need help finding a text they are interested in. If your university has resources like an e-text library you can point them to those resources. You might show them how to browse the Gutenberg project. 27 | - This exercise works better if the work with a text they know, they can compare what Voyant is showing them to their memory of the text. 28 | 29 | ### How to teach with this Walkthrough 30 | 31 | This walkthrough is designed to give students take students through a small project. One way to teach it might be to: 32 | 33 | - Discuss with students how they currently study a text and how they might. Ask them how a computer might help. Ask if any of them have ever used indexes, concordances or indexes. 34 | - Have students look at examples of analyses similar to what they could do. The interlude chapters from *Hermeneutica* are available with embedded Voyant panels here http://hermeneuti.ca . 35 | - Assign the Walkthrough 2 to the students and give them an assignment to complete that shows they have mastered the skills. Feel free to edit the Walkthrough to suit your teaching. You could, for example, pick one of the exercises and adapt it or add your own. 36 | - Provide an online office hour or two when you answer technical questions. 37 | - Depending on the exercise you asked students to do, you could have them present their results briefly to their groups or class. 38 | - Close the unit with a brief lecture where you talk about what they learned and discuss issues that came out of the exercises you got back. This is also a chance to step back and talk about how one might theorize text analysis. 39 | 40 | ---- 41 | 42 | [Dialogica Home](/index.md) | [Previous: E-texts and Analysis](/etexts.md) | [Next: Sharing Results](/share.md) 43 | 44 | ---- 45 | 46 | © Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell 47 | 48 | All materials on this site shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 49 | 50 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /share.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Sharing Results:Exporting and Embedding: Teaching Guide 2 | 3 | **Note**: This page is a **teaching guide** with advice for using [Walkthrough 3: Sharing Results](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1a2VRBO_vULjZ7t5t2DA8wMN0hQNC18zw) (Downloadable MS Word file). 4 | 5 | **Also**: Our general teaching philosophy is available in the [Introduction](/intro.md). Feel free to skip this Teaching Guide and just read and adapt the Walkthrough. It is shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) so you can do what you want. 6 | 7 | ## About Walkthrough 3 8 | 9 | The third walkthrough focuses on how to embed interactive Voyant panels into web pages of different sorts. This allows learners to then create essays or other sustained contributions and publish them for peers and the instructor to 10 | 11 | ## Objectives 12 | 13 | The objectives of Walkthrough 3 are to show learners how to: 14 | 15 | - embed interactive Voyant panels in a web page 16 | - do this in an HTML page 17 | - do this in WordPress 18 | - do this in Google Sites 19 | - Show learners how to edit a URL for Voyant to change the parameters 20 | - Encourage learners to think about 21 | 22 | ## Discussion 23 | 24 | This walkthrough allows instructors to get students to the point where they can write essays or similar assignments with text analysis embedded in the online essays. To do that we show a number of different ways to get 25 | 26 | We call these interpretative and interactive panels "hermeneutica" or hermeneutical things. You can read our thinking and see examples in our book [Hermeneutica](http://hermeneuti.ca). 27 | 28 | This walkthrough should be edited to match the technology suite that you want students to use. For example, if you have taught students to write HTML from scratch then you should use that section. If your students all get WordPress access, then use that. 29 | 30 | ### Exercises 31 | 32 | Just as you should edit the walkthrough to include only the technology you want students to use, likewise you should edit the exercises so that only the one you want is there. You may want to supplement the exercise you choose with information about the environment you want students to try, be it HTML pages, WordPress or Google Docs. 33 | 34 | The last two exercises are more advanced. Exercise 3 assumes knowledge of HTML and how to lay out a page. Exercise 4 introduces Spyral, a notebook programming environment built on Voyant. 35 | 36 | ## Resources 37 | 38 | You will want to provide your students with resources to learn about the different ways of embedding 39 | 40 | - [Voyant help for Embedding](https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/embedding) - It is always useful to remind students about the help available. 41 | - [HTML page code example](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1a2VRBO_vULjZ7t5t2DA8wMN0hQNC18zw) - Downloadable file "exampleOfEmbedding.html" has the code shown in the walkthrough. 42 | - [w3schools HTML Tutorial](https://www.w3schools.com/html/) 43 | - [Example WordPress blog page with embedded panel](https://theoreti.ca/?p=7377 ) 44 | - [Example of a Google Sites page with embedded panel](https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/embedding-voyant/home) 45 | - [Google Sites Training and Help](https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9282722 ) has links to lots of learning and reference materials. 46 | - [Spyral](https://voyant-tools.org/spyral/) 47 | - [Spyral Getting Started tutorial](https://voyant-tools.org/spyral/alta-start/) 48 | 49 | ---- 50 | 51 | [Dialogica Home](/index.md) | [Previous: Studying a Text](/study.md) | [Next: Managing Corpora with Spreadsheets or XML](/sheetAndXML.md) 52 | 53 | ---- 54 | 55 | © Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell 56 | 57 | All materials on this site shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 58 | 59 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /etexts.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # E-texts and Analysis: Teaching Guide 2 | 3 | **Note**: This page is a **teaching guide** with advice for using [Walkthrough 1: What is an electronic text and how can we study it?](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1a2VRBO_vULjZ7t5t2DA8wMN0hQNC18zw) (Downloadable MS Word file). 4 | 5 | **Also**: Our general teaching philosophy is available in the [Introduction](/intro.md). Feel free to skip this Teaching Guide and just read and adapt the Walkthrough. It is shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) so you can do what you want. 6 | 7 | ## Aboout Walkthrough 1 8 | 9 | The first walkthrough is designed to get students to the point where they can use Voyant to think through text analysis. 10 | 11 | ### Objectives 12 | 13 | The objectives of this Walkthrough 1 are for learners to get to the point where they can: 14 | 15 | - Use Voyant Tools to study a single text including 16 | - Upload a new etext 17 | - Use basic tools 18 | - Explore new tools on their own 19 | - Question tools and how they can be used in text analysis 20 | - Think about what an etext is 21 | 22 | ### Discussion 23 | 24 | The Walkthrough is built around workshops we give that take about 2 to 3 hours depending on how much time you give students to play. By the end of the workshop students should have sufficient understanding of Voyant to be able to do a simpler exercise. 25 | 26 | Here are some thoughts on teaching with this Walkthrough: 27 | 28 | - **Run your own version of Voyant** If you are demonstrating Voyant online or in a class then you should make sure you have a local copy that you can switch to. As your students start trying Voyant the main server may slow down so you want to have an alternative for continuing the lesson. See [Run your own Voyant Server](https://digihum.mcgill.ca/voyant/resources/run-your-own/voyant-server/) for instructions on how to download and run your own. 29 | - **Getting started** We have a [Getting Started](https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/start) section in the help that you can use to help students get started quickly if you find our Walkthrough too verbose. 30 | - **Getting help** Instructors can email us if you run into trouble. There is also lots of online [Voyant Tools Help](https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide) available. 31 | - **Other languages** If you are teaching in another language the Voyant interface has different language skins and can handle many languages. See the [Voyant Help: Languages](https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/languages). 32 | 33 | ### How to teach with this walkthrough 34 | There are different ways to teach a module with this Walkthrough. We talk about our general approach to teaching with these walkthroughs in the [Introduction](/intro.md). One model is to: 35 | 36 | 1. Give a very **short introductory lecture** just to introduce students to what is expected and give them a peek at what Voyant should look like. This could be prerecorded or a set of slides. 37 | 1. You could *set them an excercise* at the start to complete the unit. 38 | 1. Have them **work through the Walkthrough** on their own. 39 | 1. Think about how they can get *technical support* if they get stuck. Can you set up small groups that can provide peer support? 40 | 1. Offer an **online help session** when you are available to help with technical questions. 41 | 1. Close the unit with a **summative lecture and discussion** to reinforce the points important to your course. 42 | 1. You can then *assign an exercise* to see what students learned and to reinforce the learning. 43 | 44 | ---- 45 | 46 | [Dialogica Home](/index.md) | [Previous: Introduction](/intro.md) | [Next: Studying a Text](/study.md) 47 | 48 | ---- 49 | 50 | © Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell 51 | 52 | All materials on this site shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 53 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /sheetAndXML.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Managing Corpora using Spreadsheets or XML: Teaching Guide 2 | 3 | **Note**: This page is a **teaching guide** with advice for using [Walkthrough 4: Managing Corpora using Spreadsheets or XML](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1a2VRBO_vULjZ7t5t2DA8wMN0hQNC18zw) (Downloadable MS Word file). 4 | 5 | **Also**: Our general teaching philosophy is available in the [Introduction](/intro.md). Feel free to skip this Teaching Guide and just read and adapt the Walkthrough. It is shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) so you can do what you want. 6 | 7 | ## Aboout Walkthrough 4 8 | 9 | The fourth walkthrough is designed to show students how to manage a corpus of short texts using either a spreadsheet or XML. You will probably want to teach either one or the other, but not both. Delete what you don't need. 10 | 11 | ### Objectives 12 | 13 | To get students to the point they can: 14 | 15 | - Understand the difference between a single text and corpus 16 | - Understand why one would want to develop a corpus 17 | - Understand how to use a spreadsheet to manage a corpus 18 | - Understand how to use XML to manage a corpus 19 | - Understand how to upload and use a corpus in Voyant 20 | 21 | ## Discussion 22 | 23 | This walkthrough is designed to show students how they can use text analysis to study all sorts of things other than literary works. It 24 | 25 | ### Spreadsheets 26 | 27 | - You can have students use either Google Sheets or Excel for this. We've tested both. 28 | - Spreadsheets become unmanageable if you load too many cells with lots of text. A spreadsheet works well for about 100 web pages. 29 | - Make sure you show them how to paste a lengthy text into a single cell rather than having each line go into a different cell! It is also useful to show them how to manipulate the width of columns and height of rows. 30 | - It is useful to have students document the texts they are gathering in a spreadsheet even if they keep the full text separatly in text files. 31 | 32 | ### XML 33 | 34 | - If you are going to teach students to use XML you need to take some time to explain XML to them. W3Schools has an [XML Introduction](https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_whatis.asp) (and there are lots of other introductions out there.) 35 | - You need to be careful as to what editor you suggest students use. They may use Microsoft and think that it saves XML (wich is does, but not the way they think.) It is useful to mention that in Word they have to remember to save a text file. At the high end, you can have students download the 30-day trial version of [oXygen](https://www.oxygenxml.com/). This is a complex tool that may distract them from text analysis. Only use oXygen if you want them to learn about XML in depth anyway. 36 | - The minimal XML you need to introduce so that they can use XML to manage a corpus would include: 37 | - Explain that they need a single root element like 38 | - Explain elements and attributes and provide them a simple model. 39 | - Explain that they need to check if the XML is well-formed and how they can do that just by dragging the file to Chrome. 40 | - Explain some of the common typos to look for like special characters in the text (<, &), unclosed elements, different spelling of element names, and so on. 41 | 42 | ## How to teach with this walkthrough 43 | Here is an outline for how you might teach this as a module in a larger course. This assumes that you have already introduced text analysis using the earlier walkthroughs like [E-Texts and Analysis](/extexts.md). 44 | 45 | 1. Introduce the module and emphasize the objectives. 46 | 1. Explain what a corpus is and why one would want to use a corpus. 47 | 1. Encourage students to think about iteratively building and studying a corpus. Talk about how they can add interpretative metadata as their research progresses. 48 | 1. Talk about how a corpus can be developed to study all sorts of phenomena, not just literature. Give examples. 49 | 1. Show a small project where you gathered a small number of web pages on a subject and documented it in a spreadsheet or XML. 50 | 1. Show students and example of how you copied and pasted text into the spreadsheet or XML file and added the metadata. 51 | 1. Show how to upload to Voyant so that documents are recognized. You can also show how one could create groups for comparison either by saving subtexts from a spreadsheet or using the Group by feature in the XML upload options. 52 | 1. Assign an exercise where students have to build a small corpus and document it. The idea is that the students then go through a version of Walkthrough 4 that you have edited to include your exercise and the technology (spreadsheets or XML)that you want them to use. 53 | 1. The assignment will create the context for them to use the edited Walkthrough 4. 54 | 1. Organize a help session so that students who get stuck can share their screens and get help. The help might be peer-to-peer or something you provide. 55 | 1. You should specify how you want the assignment returned. One approach is to ask for one page of documentation and a copy of the file (spreadsheet or XML file.) This focuses on creating the corpus and can be followed by an assignment that focuses on studying the corpus. 56 | 1. After you have seen the assignments you can have a closing lecture/discussion to reinforce the ideas and give students ideas about where they could go with this. 57 | 58 | ---- 59 | 60 | [Dialogica Home](/index.md) | [Previous: Sharing Results](/share.md) | [Next: Following a Theme](/following.md) 61 | 62 | ---- 63 | 64 | © Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell 65 | 66 | All materials on this site shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 67 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /intro.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Introduction to Dialogica 2 | 3 | ## About Dialogica 4 | 5 | Welcome to **Dialogica: Thinking-Through Voyant** (DTTV). This is a cross between a dialogue on computer-assisted text analysis and a hands-on guide to using Voyant . The idea is that reflection on questions and hands-on experimentation complement each other. We think they are the best way to learn how to use computer-assisted text analysis to interpret electronic texts. Playing with Voyant can be an occasion for reflecting back on both tools and questions about text analysis. 6 | 7 | ### What are dialogica? 8 | 9 | Dialogica are dialogical things. This web site grew out of conversations we had and it brings together learning materials designed around questions and conversations with others, software and texts. Dialogi.ca the web site has two types of things: 10 | 11 | - We have pages like this one that are "meta" and talk about how to teach with the materials here, and 12 | - We link to the walkthroughs. 13 | 14 | ### What are the Walkthroughs? 15 | 16 | The Walkthroughs are self study materials that you can use to learn on your own or adapt for students. They are Microsoft Word files so you can edit them as needed and we share them under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) so you can adapt as needed. 17 | 18 | ### What is Voyant? 19 | 20 | Voyant (http://voyant-tools.org) is the collection of tools that evolved out of our experiments and these walkthroughs will show you how use Voyant for you own. Hermeneutica theorized computer-assisted text interpretation and included interludes where we showed the thinking-through of some experiments (see for dynamic examples). DTTV takes the approach of weaving questions about electronic texts and text analysis together with hands-on walks that start with Voyant and then go beyond. 21 | 22 | ### Why all this dialogical discourse? 23 | 24 | In the spirit of encouraging you to think through the issue, this is a conversational set of walkthroughs. We alternate questions that encourage you to think about with activities to try and then discussions with more questions. We encourage students to pause and think through the questions before proceeding. Think of these walkthroughs as dialogue thingies with which to start conversations not end them. 25 | 26 | ### Can I just play with the tools? 27 | 28 | Of course! We hope you do get distracted by the tools. That's a great way to learn. Stop and play with a tool or feature. Experiment on your own. We want you get to the point where you can use Voyant to talk about and through texts. 29 | 30 | ---- 31 | # Our Teaching Philosophy 32 | 33 | Our teaching philosophy is to start by showing tools and asking questions and then let students play with the tools. For this reason we start our workshops on Voyant by showing a simple [Word Cloud](https://bit.ly/2lH9One) and asking students what they think they are seeing. Then we let them loose to play with the simple panel. You can see the [script that we use in introductory hands-on workshops here](http://hermeneuti.ca/intro-workshop). In our in-classroom teaching we tend to: 34 | 35 | - Ask general questions to orient students. These are not questions that have definite answers and students aren't expected to know the answers they are to get them thinking before they read or play with anything. 36 | - Show them a tool and how to use it. While showing the tool we might often ask questions to get students thinking about how to figure tools out for themselves. 37 | - Let them play with the tool. It is in playing with the tool that students learn and as they play with it you can 38 | - Provide follow up questions and exercises for the students who move quickly. 39 | 40 | ## Teaching Online 41 | 42 | When teaching online we have followed a similar cycle of asking questions, showing something, letting students play, and then discussing how it worked. We have used technologies like Zoom where we can share our screen. For these we typically provide a script with the key links and explanations. The walkthroughs provided here can be the script, though they may be more verbose than needed. Some advice for those trying to provide a workshop online: 43 | 44 | - You need to be more deliberate about what you do. Stop periodically and check that you can be heard and that they can see your screen when demoing. Regularly tell people what you are doing and what will happen next. 45 | - You need to check in periodically with at least some students to make sure they have followed you. 46 | - Show students how to use the Chat feature to raise their hands and to ask questions. 47 | - Have a script so that they can go ahead or catch up. A script can also be used by students who felt left behind and need to review carefully. 48 | - Prepare a set of tabs with what you want to demonstrate beforehand. Test that the technology works. 49 | 50 | ## Self-study 51 | The Dialogica Walkthroughs have been written so that they could be used as self-study materials that students would work through on their own. Thus they can be used in a larger online course where you can't check in live with students, but need them to work on their own. They could be used in the following model. 52 | 53 | 1. Post a short lecture on the class site. The lecture might give a brief overview, ask questions and show what they should be able to do. 54 | 1. Ask students to work through the Walkthrough on their own and complete an exercise that demonstrates mastery of the competencies. 55 | 1. Have an online office hour(s) when you are available for people who are having trouble. 56 | 1. Organize a discussion after students have finished the exercise to reinforce the ideas learned. 57 | 1. Provide a short summary lecture that then links to the next unit. 58 | 59 | ## Other sources of ideas 60 | 61 | We have created a list of links to other ideas for teaching text analysis. See [Other courses and useful links](/other.html). 62 | 63 | ---- 64 | 65 | # Acknowledgements 66 | 67 | We thank all those who have worked with us on Voyant. The dialogical nature of this book comes from our conversations with each other, with others who have taught, and with our students. Alas [Stéfan Sinclair passed in April of 2020](https://csdh-schn.org/stefan-sinclair-in-memoriam-2/) ending the dialogue that animated this collection. We maintain and add to this in his memory, especially the memory of all the work he put into developing usable tools like Voyant and teaching us to use them. 68 | 69 | ---- 70 | 71 | [Dialogica Home](/index.md) | [Next: E-Texts and Analysis](/extexts.md) 72 | 73 | ---- 74 | 75 | © Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell 76 | 77 | All materials on this site shared under a [Creative Commons By Attribution license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 78 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------