Third Assignment

Choose one of the options below and write an essay in response. Your essay should be at least four full pages in length (not counting images, charts, and tables) and should not exceed six pages. Use double-space lineation, a 12-point Roman font, and one-inch margins on all sides. Your writing is expected to be error-free and up to university standards.

Essay should be argumentative essays: there should be one main thesis that the essay attempts to support/prove. The thesis represents your own original insight into the topic.

A large portion of the grade will be an assessment of the written component of this assignment. The hands-on approach to text analysis here is important and should be done well, but I will be mainly looking for intelligent reflections on what you have done with the more technical aspects of the assignment and the problems with them and opportunities for further work.

The assignment is due on January 12th. Consult the course outline for information about late assignments.

Option 1: Voyant and HyperPo

Choose one of the following files: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, and On the Origin of Species. Explore some basic text analysis possibilities and results using one or both of HyperPo and Voyant. You will probably want to focus on one or more of: word count data, word collocation data, and word distribution data. You may want to include tables and/or images (of word distributions) in your essay. What information about the text can you retrieve? What are the benefits and limitations of digital text analysis on this document using your approach? Can you arrive at any conclusions regarding the text using your approach?

Option 2: Bigrams

Analyse the word and grapheme bigrams of two to four of the following texts: Emma, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, Tom Sawyer, and On the Origin of Species. Use the Word Bigrams and Bigraphemes tools to assemble your data. Write an essay that characterises the data and attempts to come to some conclusions about the data. Feel free to divide up the texts into a few parts, if you would like. What information about the texts can you retrieve? What are the benefits and limitations of bigram analysis on these documents using your approach? Can you arrive at any conclusions regarding the texts using this approach?

Option 3: Text Vectors and Chapter Words

Choose one to three of the following novels: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, The Hobbit, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and The Hunger Games. Explore some basic text analysis possibilities and results using both Text Vectors and Chapter Words. You may want to include tables and/or images (of word distributions) in your essay. What information about the text(s) can you retrieve? What are the benefits and limitations of digital text analysis on this document(s) using your approach? Can you arrive at any conclusions regarding the text(s) using your approach?