CritMakingAgeOfAI

Resources to accompany the book *Critical Making in the Age of AI* by Emily Johnson and Anastasia Salter

View the Project on GitHub

Digital Analysis (Lab Four)

The tools in this unit are more traditional digital humanities research tools, and they help researchers leverage technology to better understand humans. The things you can analyze with the tools covered here range from the best (high literature) to the worst (social media) and everything between. What can you learn about humanity using these tools? What interests you?

Where to Start

Explore the three different tools and consider the types of questions you might be able to answer with each of them.

Then, do some searching for a lengthy text or website (if your tool allows it). You could search a specific book, or several books by the same author (or compare and contrast sets of books like the Rambsy article in this unit). This link has literary corpora. Not into literature? Take a tour of this corpora of political speeches. Speak another language? You might be interested in these corpora in other languages.

Once you find a large text, conduct your scholarly research to add more dimension and perspective to your project. (See links under "what is due" for helpful places to start). You can do this the other way around, as well: first find 2 scholarly sources on a topic, then look for a larger text to analyze.

What conclusions can you draw from your use of this tool? What conclusions can you not draw from your use of this tool?

What is Due

The direct link to a separate page (or blog post) on your website that contains:

  1. A paragraph (~2-3 sentences) explaining what you did (what tool, what body of text, and what term did you use?)
  2. A paragraph or two (~100-150 words) explaining your results 
    • What did the tool tell you?
    • What can you conclude based on what the tool told you?
    • What can't you conclude?
  3. At least two scholarly citations in parenthetical citation format:
    • Remember, scholarly means peer-reviewed. At least 2 sources have to be from academic journals. These aren't websites or primary sources.
    • Who else is writing about this topic? 
    • Who else has used this tool or a similar one to answer a similar question? (It can be on a different topic - "This author's explanation of #blm helped me understand the tweets that included #pride" or "This author investigated the mention of the word "woman" in 19th century literature, and I searched for the same term in 17th century literature" etc.)
    • You can start here but click "articles" under the Primo search
    • Another great place to look (pro tip: click "Cite" on the right hand side once you find your article in here for the citation information)
  4. A Works Cited or References "page"

Explore

AntConc

AntConc: https://ucfonline.maps.arcgis.com/home/index.html 

Overview

AntConc is a "freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis." In this context, "corpus" means a body of text--this could be as specific as a paragraph or as voluminous as everything ever written in English. (Okay that last example doesn't exist electronically, but here's a list of large corpora).

Examples

 Resources