Blog Post #3 Exploring Text Visualization Tools
I took 3 sample student goal statements from their ePortfolios as my "corpus" for this exercise. Had a number of technical difficulties, including how to get the screenshots to work so that I could post the images here. Still haven't figured that out, so no images posted yet; the amount of time involved to "play around" with the tools, particularly "Voyant" has been frustrating. (Just as an aside, I find that as a learner, I have little patience to explore technology tools on my own, and much prefer to have a "mentor" at my side). BTW, is it possible to attach a pdf or Word document here? Another thing I haven't figured out...
Although I did not find the Wordle word cloud and Voyant visualizations to be particularly illuminating, I am viewing this exercise as completely exploratory. I am wondering what exactly we can learn from these data. What can they tell us about the students who wrote them? Is it possible to discern goal commitment? Why they are coming to college? What they hope to achieve? I am not really sure yet. Also, a certain amount of the data may be irrelevant: for example, does it mean anything that the word "goal" appears most frequently in an essay entitled "my goals?" Should that word be "thrown out" so to speak, like a "stop word" (e.g., to, in, a. the) in Voyant?
I will update this post after I figure out how to add the images.... More to come.... Paul
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Blog Post #1 Beyond Two Cultures
I can't say that I bridge the two cultures - humanism and science - in my everyday life, not exactly. But I do balance my intellectual interests (linguistics, pedagogy and learning) with more physical, hands-on pursuits. Foremost is gardening, which I have avidly done since I was a young boy. I love designing, planting, and caring for the garden, which I find a total change of pace from my "mental" work at the college. My other physical pursuit - which most people are surprised to hear - is carriage driving! Yes, it's actually a competitive sport (I have some ribbons to prove it!) and it's how I get the opportunity to be around horses. I took up the sport in my 50s, and believe me, it was difficult to be a total and complete novice at something - and it's not that easy to do! Just as some people view science and the humanities as two cultures, it's interesting to me that the mental and physical realms are also often viewed as two distinct worlds.
I can't say that I bridge the two cultures - humanism and science - in my everyday life, not exactly. But I do balance my intellectual interests (linguistics, pedagogy and learning) with more physical, hands-on pursuits. Foremost is gardening, which I have avidly done since I was a young boy. I love designing, planting, and caring for the garden, which I find a total change of pace from my "mental" work at the college. My other physical pursuit - which most people are surprised to hear - is carriage driving! Yes, it's actually a competitive sport (I have some ribbons to prove it!) and it's how I get the opportunity to be around horses. I took up the sport in my 50s, and believe me, it was difficult to be a total and complete novice at something - and it's not that easy to do! Just as some people view science and the humanities as two cultures, it's interesting to me that the mental and physical realms are also often viewed as two distinct worlds.
Blog Post #2 - Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Humanities
Franco Moretti's article discusses a quantitative history of literature, specifically looking at a genre (the novel) in terms of a series of cycles - showing not one rise of the novel, but multiple rises. For me, the following statement was most illuminating: "Quantitative research provides a type of data which is ideally independent of interpretations... and that is also its limit: it provides data, not interpretation." The question arises: is data alone sufficient? Don't we expect research to also involve interpretation, hypotheses, explanations of data? Moretti's answer seems to be that while "quantification poses the problem...and leaves you often with a perfectly clear problem - and no idea of a solution," this lack of explanation (solution) is exactly what is needed, at least in his field, because we "are used to asking only those questions for which we already have an answer." Nevertheless, Moretti also seems to acknowledge in other parts of the article that he, as a researcher, wants to account for the data (and thus has published explanations and hypotheses). I am not sure yet how to reconcile this in my mind, and look forward to my own project - to see if I will be content with quantitative data, or feel compelled to provide explanations (conjectures??).
Franco Moretti's article discusses a quantitative history of literature, specifically looking at a genre (the novel) in terms of a series of cycles - showing not one rise of the novel, but multiple rises. For me, the following statement was most illuminating: "Quantitative research provides a type of data which is ideally independent of interpretations... and that is also its limit: it provides data, not interpretation." The question arises: is data alone sufficient? Don't we expect research to also involve interpretation, hypotheses, explanations of data? Moretti's answer seems to be that while "quantification poses the problem...and leaves you often with a perfectly clear problem - and no idea of a solution," this lack of explanation (solution) is exactly what is needed, at least in his field, because we "are used to asking only those questions for which we already have an answer." Nevertheless, Moretti also seems to acknowledge in other parts of the article that he, as a researcher, wants to account for the data (and thus has published explanations and hypotheses). I am not sure yet how to reconcile this in my mind, and look forward to my own project - to see if I will be content with quantitative data, or feel compelled to provide explanations (conjectures??).
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