Post #3 - Exploring Text Visualization Tools

2/7/2014

I selected a book from Project Gutenberg titled as " The Evolution of Modern Medicine- a Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University " by William Osler in April, 1913. 

The above word cloud was created using Wordle based on the whole text of the book.

And then I created a visualization of the same text using the Voyant Visualization tool. It gave me a summary as follows:

• There is 1 document in this corpus with a total of 66,108 words and 9,270 unique words.
• Most frequent words in the corpus: the (5,782), of (3,853), and (2,154), in (1,776), to (1,349). 

And a visualized graph was generated as shown below:

 

Since the book is about modern medicine, we are not surprised to find "medicine", "disease", "Galen", "anatomy", and "physician" to be the most frequently occurred words in the text.

The experiments with these text analysis tools were fun and pretty easy to use. I believe students will love this.

Post #2 Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Humanities

2/4/2014

I read the NYT article "Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches" by Patricia Cohen. This article mainly discussed the challenges humanists are facing when it comes to digital humanities. More specifically, how big data are changing the scope and the way humanist do research. 

In this article, the author mentioned that "Digital humanities scholars also face a more practical test:  What knowledge can they produce that their predecessors could not?" In other words, what can humanists do with the unprecedented data available to them and what conclusions can they draw from them? 

After reading the article, I personally think digital humanities is more like an opportunity than challenge to humanists. Most time, a good book, an amazing movie, a fantastic musical may mean different things to different people. The impact of them is in our hearts, in our mind, hard to describe accurately, even harder to share sometimes. But with digital tools, imaginations, pictures in our mind, even feelings can be built into a concrete object. More amazingly, a lot of people can work together to make it more accurate, comprehensive and delicate.

To me, this evolution in humanities is very similar to the evolution form 2D to 3D movies in the film-making industry. It's not destroying something old and building something new. Instead it's develop new things on the basis of old things. 

There are challenges, but more opportunities coming with it. Every one should embrace this new era or big data, both scientists and humanists!