Stanford Students Use Digital Tools to Analyze Classic Texts | Humanities at Stanford - 2 views
humanexperience.stanford.edu/digitaltexts
stanford students Digital tools Critical Thinking accelerated reader program
shared by Ismael Angervil on 11 Sep 13
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advanced technology initially lured them in,
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Ismael Angervil on 11 Sep 13This is why the student continued, and were very much excited about the project.
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English PhD student Ryan Heuser says, “I think that it’s really ground-breaking on a few levels. Number one, this methodology and this level of cooperation are rarely seen in the humanities. It’s also revolutionary in the sense that we’re just a bunch of grad students and undergraduates, and in two quarters, we have built an entire corpus of novels and three separate ways of studying them. It demonstrates the vitality of the students.”
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One of the students explaining his thoughts on the usage of technology to analyze over 1200 digitized literary works to find patterns and other information.
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During the fall quarter students were provided with a general introduction to digital literary research techniques, and they began to learn how to write code designed to process the text line-by-line and word-by-word.
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Technology was a tool however, and not the academic focus.
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That shows, they were more interested in the technology, so than that become their main academic focus.
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“It was frankly too interesting of a class to pass up. There are very few other classes that are going to present this kind of opportunity.”
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This a student's response when asked why he decided to take a digital humanities course.
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Jockers has adapted techniques in the field of linguistics to use for literary analysis and has been examining literary works with computer-based tools. He looks for recurring themes and trends in word usage and then examines how these aspects of the novel’s content and style change over time
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With this in mind, he began teaching an Introduction to Humanities Computing course a few years ago
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Students who took that course learned to extract information from individual texts.
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Linguistics scholars typically use computational and statistical techniques to analyze large amounts of textual data, but Jockers explains that in his own research, his methods of approaching text derive from a relatively new area of scholarship called corpus stylistics. Corpus stylistics is an approach that uses theories relating to linguistic concepts such as phonetics and syntax to analyze literary texts.
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Although the Chadwyck-Healey source texts were written in English,
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the students would need to become familiar with a few new languages to be able to make use of the digitized text.
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“In this class, there will be 1,200 books assigned, but students won’t read any of them.
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This shows student will not do a research using physical book. So in my opinion they'll rather use a source of technology.
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The comprehensive digitized literature collection is a model for the kinds of resources literary scholars will likely turn to with increasing frequency in the near future; indeed,
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“The process was completely driven by students in the class. It was impressive to see how fourteen people arrive at an interesting overall proposal that really ties everything together quite well,
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after the formal seminar was over the students continued to meet in the lab and work through the data. Among other discoveries, the team has found that American usage of proper nouns nearly triples in frequency over the course of the century, while British usage remains relatively stable. “This trend is significant, says Blevins, “and may speak to the increasing desire and need of a young, expanding nation to assign new names to its places and people.”
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This is some information the team found out after the seminar was over.
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The quarter flew by, and by the end, it was clear that more time was needed for such an in-depth project. After prompting from the students, Jockers agreed to offer an ad hoc seminar to be held in the department’s newly born “literature lab.” In the winter of 2010, students were able to pick up where they left off
