One form of analysis that can be helpful to historians is text analysis. In simplest terms, this is the process of analyzing textual data to extract insights and meaning. During class, I gave a short overview of text analysis as a digital method and discussed several key terms. We also had a visit from Rafia Mirza, SMU’s Research Librarian for Digital Scholarship. She discussed library resources available for digital history work and also demonstrated two tools for text analysis: Google Ngram and Voyant.

Google Ngram Activity — https://books.google.com/ngrams/

This visualization shows the frequency of terms over time in Google Book’s corpus. Select 3 somewhat related terms. For example, comic book characters, book characters, illnesses, school subjects, religious terms, political issues, historical figures, etc. Type each term in the search box followed by a comma, and then add the next term. Explore the Ngram visualization by mousing over the trend lines. Take a screenshot of your work and submit it in Canvas.

Voyant Activity — Using Readex’s African American Periodicals (access provided by SMU Libraries)

  • What can we learn about African American history using text analysis? To find out, we’ll use software called Voyant, and a corpus of African American newspapers from 1825–1995, provided by Readex’s African American Periodicals database.
  • Once in the database, enter a word/term/subject in the search box that you think might appear in this type of source. This could be anything from a particular holiday to a political movement. For example, our guest speaker searched for “breakfast program” hoping to find articles about the Black Panther Party’s breakfast programs for children. When the search results appear, select at least 5 articles by clicking the checkbox next to the item name. Then click the brown “Explore” tab in the top right hand corner of the screen. On the next window, click “Continue and Explore.” This will take you to a tool called Voyant. It carries out various types of text analysis on the small corpa you selected.
  • The first page is the “snapshot” view, showing several different types of text analysis—word cloud, term trend lines, top terms, etc. Click around and explore. See each type of analysis in more detail by clicking on the individual types under “Visualize by” in the left-hand column.
  • Think about the analysis it is giving. Are you surprised by the results? Or do they seem to make sense, given the subject you searched for originally? In our guest’s example, the terms “party,” “black,” and “children” were some of the most frequent terms. Given the subject she searched for, this makes sense. 
  • Take a screenshot of your Voyant work and submit it in Slack. It can be the snapshot view or of one individual visualizations. Then write a short paragraph which explains: 1) what subject you originally searched for; 2) did you find terms and trends that made sense or were what you would have expected? If so, what were they?; 3) what was interesting/surprising about what Voyant found?; 4) what topic or detail from African American history does this help you better understand? Submit your response in Canvas.