Exercise 1: Voyant

Tools & Materials

• Voyant (documentation)

• Lexos (documentation)

• Frederick Douglass dataset (an already prepared dataset)

Part One: Preparing the Dataset in Lexos

1.) Go to Lexos

2.) Cut and paste the URLs below to the Scrape box (right side) and click Scrape

The URLs are to text files on Project Gutenberg of Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; My Bondage My Freedom; Abolition Fanaticism in New York; and Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23/pg23.txt
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/202/202.txt
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/34915/pg34915.txt
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/99/pg99.txt

3.) Click on Prepare and then Scrub

Select: "Make Lowercase," "Remove Digits," "Scrub Tags," "Remove Punctuation," and "Keep Hyphens"

Click Apply

4.) In the Lemmas box add the below, click Apply, and then Download.

slave-child:children
slave-mother:mother
slave:slaves
master:masters
wife, wifes:wives
husband's:husband
husband:husbands
child, childs:children
baby, babys:babies
infant:infants
mother:mothers
father's:father
father:fathers
parent:parents
family, familys:famlies

5.) Locate the download text files and open one. We will discuss the results.

Part Two: Text Analysis with Voyant

1.) Download the Frederick Douglass dataset or use the one you created in part one.

2.) Upload the dataset to Voyant

3.) Explore some of the lemma words (above) with different Voyant tools. Look at the different ways you can view their frequencies, relationships to other words, and their locations within the texts.

Breakout Group Questions

1.) What tools do you find most useful or promising be it for analyzing these texts or texts you are interested in exploring.

2.) What might be some of the challenges and pitfalls of Voyant as you understand it so far?

3.) Are there anyways you can see text analysis (in Voyant or another tool) fitting in with your own research or teaching?

Alternative Text For Further Exploration

• Boston Public Schools related materials (Internet Archive - search"boston public school," facets selected: Texts, Always Available)

• Boston health (Internet Archive - search "boston health," facets selected: Texts, Always Available)

• Search Project Guttenberg for a variety of pre-1923 books.