Lab 5 - Text as Data I

For today’s lab, we will be not reading some books from Project Gutenberg. Before you do anything else, find a book you’ve never read before and jot down ideas about what you think the book is about. You’ve never read it, but if it’s a well-known book you probably have some ideas. List some predicted themes, characters, plot elements, or stylistic characteristics of the text.

From there, we’ll be not reading that book using a few GUI (graphical user interface) tools. Typically I would do these things in the programming language R, and we’ll talk about why, but these interfaces provide a great introduction to computational text analysis.

• Google Ngram Viewer
• Voyant Tools
• Textexture

We might also think about an experiment we could pursue using collation software, like Quinn describes in this week’s DSC post.

• Diff Demo