A Beginner’s Guide to Using Voyant for Digital Theme Analysis

“Digital Theme Analysis” depicts the role that thematic analysis plays in literary criticism, places traditional thematic analysis approaches alongside digital ones, and offers best practices for carrying out digital thematic analysis in the context of Voyant Tools. The chapter identifies thematic analysis as a meaningful pattern that can be traced throughout text(s) that may form the foundation for critical interpretation. Authors draw continuities between traditional theme analysis that revolves around close reading and digital theme analysis that can be carried out using a variety of automated digital methodologies, and indicate how the latter can help accelerate the process while ensuring that the significance of themes are accurately estimated through an empirical, machined approach. Two applications of digital theme analysis are illustrated using Voyant Tools, a popular open-source tool that combines a variety of simple text-mining tools in a single, intuitive graphical user interface. The first case study is an ecological reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and the second an exploratory thematic analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, through which best practices for carrying out digital thematic analysis are proposed. Together, the chapter demonstrates how digital theme analysis can serve as a point of entry for an almost on-demand approach to digital theme analysis—providing that the researcher understands the applications of the tool and how to prepare and interpret the data, which they can incorporate alongside close reading to create a sophisticated, fully fleshed out literary argument that takes advantage of the unprecedented speed and scope of distant reading

The Value of Plurality in 'The Network with a Thousand Entrances'

This contribution reflects on the value of plurality in the ‘network with a thousand entrances’ suggested by McCarty (http://goo.gl/H3HAfs), and others, in association with approaching time-honoured annotative and commentary practices of much-engaged texts. The question is how this approach aligns with tensions, today, surrounding the multiplicity of endeavour associated with modeling practices of annotation by practitioners of the digital humanities. Our work, hence, surveys annotative practice across its reflection in contemporary praxis, from the MIT annotation studio whitepaper (http://goo.gl/8NBdnf) through the work of the Open Annotation Collaboration (http://www.openannotation.org), and manifest in multiple tools facilitating annotation across the web up to and including widespread application in social knowledge creation suites like Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web annotation

Prototyping Across the Disciplines

This article pursues the idea that within interdisciplinary teams in which researchers might find themselves participating, there are very different notions of research outcomes, as well as languages in which they are expressed. We explore the notion of the software prototype within the discussion of making and building in digital humanities. The backdrop for our discussion is a collaboration between project team members from computer science and literature that resulted in a tool named TopoText that was built to geocode locations within an unstructured text and to perform some basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks about the context of those locations. In the interest of collaborating more effectively with increasingly larger and more multidisciplinary research communities, we move outward from that specific collaboration to explore one of the ways that such research is characterized in the domain of software engineering—the ISO/IEC 25010:2011 standard. Although not a perfect fit with discourses of value in the humanities, it provides a possible starting point for forging shared vocabularies within the research collaboratory. In particular, we focus on a subset of characteristics outlined by the standard and attempt to translate them into terms generative of further discussion in the digital humanities community

TopoText: Interactive Digital Mapping of Literary Text

We demonstrate TopoText, an interactive tool for digital mapping of literary text. TopoText takes as input a literary piece of text such as a novel or a biography article and automatically extracts all place names in the text. The identified places are then geoparsed and displayed on an interactive map. TopoText calculates the number of times a place was mentioned in the text, which is then reflected on the map allowing the end-user to grasp the importance of the different places within the text. It also displays the most frequent words mentioned within a specified proximity of a place name in context or across the entire text. This can also be faceted according to part of speech tags. Finally, TopoText keeps the human in the loop by allowing the end-user to disambiguate places and to provide specific place annotations. All extracted information such as geolocations, place frequencies, as well as all user-provided annotations can be automatically exported as a CSV file that can be imported later by the same user or other users

Pragmatic Explorations towards Understanding Wikipedia in an Academic Context

Construit au cours des vingt dernières années et contenant maintenant des millions d’articles divers, Wikipédia est devenu une encyclopédie mondialementreconnue et un puits profond d’informations utilisées quotidiennement par le grand public. Alors que Wikipédia était à l'origine étiqueté par les universitaires comme non digne de confiance, introuvable et tabou, la compréhension actuelle de la plate-forme évolue. Notamment, les chercheurs et chercheuses commencent à saisir le vaste potentiel offert par Wikipédia pour un engagement étendu et légitime avec les créateurs et créatrices de connaissances à la fois au sein et au-delà de l'académie. Cet article traite de quatre initiatives de connaissances ouvertes menées par l’Electronic Textual Cultures Lab à l'Université de Victoria qui explorent l’impact de la participation à Wikipédia.Built over the last twenty years and now containing millions of diverse articles, Wikipedia has become a globally recognized encyclopedia and a deep well of information used daily by the general public. While Wikipedia was originally labelled by academics as untrustworthy, untraceable, and taboo, present understandings of the platform are shifting. Notably, scholars are beginning to grasp the vast potential offered by Wikipedia for extended, legitimate engagement with knowledge builders both within and beyond the academy. This paper discusses four open knowledge initiatives spearheaded by The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria that explore the impact of Wikipedia participation

Introduction: Special Issue, Spatial Humanities

This is the introduction to the Spatial Humanities special issue.&nbsp

Laying the Foundation for Community-Driven, Open Cultural Gazetteers

Geospatial humanities projects rely on information found in gazetteers to supply the infrastructure for projects. However, a majority of spatial gazetteers provide place names and geographical coordinates but lack contextualizing information that give meaning to a place, making them insufficient resources for humanities inquiry. In this article, I explore contemporary approaches to data collection and models for cultural gazetteers set forth by early modern chorographical traditions to lay the foundation for building community-driven, open cultural gazetteers. Concurrently, the role of the public in providing Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) by harnessing user-friendly tools is explored

Introduction: Special Issue, Spatial Humanities

This is the introduction to the Spatial Humanities special issue.&nbsp

Foundations for On-Campus Open Social Scholarship Activities

Social knowledge creation, citizen scholarship, interdisciplinary collaborations, and university-community partnerships have become more common and more visible in contemporary academia. The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) currently focuses on how to engage with such transformations in knowledge creation. In this paper we survey the intellectual foundation of social knowledge creation and major initiatives undertaken to pursue and enact this research in the ETCL. “Social Knowledge Creation: Three Annotated Bibliographies” (Arbuckle, Belojevic, Hiebert, Siemens, et al. 2014), and an updated iteration, “An Annotated Bibliography on Social Knowledge Creation,” (Arbuckle, El Hajj, El Khatib, Seatter, Siemens, et al, 2017), explore how academics collaborate to create knowledge, and how social knowledge creation can bridge the real or perceived gap between the academy and the public. This knowledgebase lays the foundation for the “Open Social Scholarship Annotated Bibliography” (El Hajj, El Khatib, Leibel, Seatter, et al. 2019), which draws on research that adopts and propagates social knowledge creation ideals and explores trends such as accessible research development and dissemination. Using these annotated bibliographies as a theoretical foundation for action, the ETCL began test-driving open social scholarship initiatives with the launch of the Open Knowledge Practicum (OKP). The OKP invites members of the community and the university to pursue their own research in the ETCL. Research output is published in open, public venues. Overall, we aim to acknowledge the expanding, social nature of knowledge production, and to detail how the ETCL utilizes in-person interaction and the digital medium to facilitate open social scholarship