Besides the blossoming and potentially chaotic dialogue amongst disciplines, our passionately specialized discourse must also consider the actual everyday world of our students. No matter how young students may be, they bring their own life histories, personalities, interests, and wishes to the classroom. They bring their own, unique perspective of the world, shaped in ways that — as we faculty members grow older — may become potentially elusive to us. Fifteen or so years ago, the elephant in the room was the internet. Then it was technology in the classroom (remember them blogs and clickers?). Today, the buzz words are “social media” and “apps.” Tomorrow, who knows?
Digital text-mining tools can help researchers understand document collections that are prohibitively large for a close-reading. Our collection of runaway slave advertisements from Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi totals over 2,500 individual ads! Not only would it be extremely time consuming to read this entire collection, the consistently short, boilerplate format of runaway ads can make it difficult to really distinguish between them. The ads from Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi start to all look practically indistinguishable, making it difficult for close-reading alone to recognize pattern breaks between the states, without the assistance of computational data. This is where Voyant comes in. We hoped that the "distant-reading" capabilities of Voyant would be able to pick up on larger word usage trends that are not immediately apparent when reading with the human eye.
