Is this working well for you? It would be a real gift to the other members of this class if you were to include the PivotTable tool in your final presentation. It's a digital tool, after all!!!

Wow! Fascinating. How might you begin to draw all of this information together to make an argument about the trade in Persian Luster Tiles?

What do you know about the practice of creating local museums in the USA? It's a complex question that would be worth your attention!!

Side note: the viz over there to the left doesn't really seem to represent the notion of "connection," you know what I mean?

Good question! How might you go about constructing an answer? Be mindful that questions of gender require a direct take on its social construction in the period in question.

This is all great information! It is time now to answer a few "so what" questions.

What are your arguments for why "most number of artifacts" implies "most significant time?"

So...the bequest era and the end of the dealer era are also coincident????

Thank you for this! Have you started to think about what the implications of these patterns might be? The "bequest" era appears to be coincident with WWII and its aftermath, for instance...

This sentence is unclear.

Yes, indeed. As I note in the syllabus...it's not that one must always start with a hypothesis, but rather it is important to know that a certain amount of expertise is necessary to start with tools. You all are gaining some of this expertise over the course of this term!

You truly changed hearts and minds on presentation day with your commitment to this strategy. Thanks for being so clear about the benefits of recognizing when change is not only good but salutary!!!

Excellent clarity.

I wouldn't go this far, but it's a big deal, yes. Perhaps you can find the "@positive categories group" list:https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/categories

Tell me more!

You have a career to keep working on this. Please do believe me that it is an important hump to surmount, though. Computers are created by humans, every.step.of.the.way. Trust them as much as you'd trust a human who has never lived a life outside a metal box for a single day...

I thought you also used the positive and negative dictionary list in Voyant???

These visualizaitons are NOT the end of the road for your analysis. They are pointing the way not answering your question...so what do they point to?

I can't without seeing them! I'm happy to look them over and we can discuss.

Tell us what it shows...directly. What are the colors? What are the relative sizes?

I hope you've been paying attention to Yujin's work...you have come around to similar realizations about the relationship between "count" and "meaning." Just because a word isn't used a lot doesn't always necessarily mean it isn't a crucial component to a text.

What are your thoughts here? Is this the decision you would have made if you were in charge of this tool?

Good! Why! For the next iteration, don't leave this to be assumed.

Humans and their own expectations of themselves...it's a thing. Would it be better to never have made the connection!!??

Correct.

I bet this is where the machine learning comes in--or even somewhat simpler statistical model like LDA (Mallet's underlying statistics).

Take that "bag of words" model! Have you read Matt's topic modelling piece yet? It's good on this.

I'm no expert here, but I suspect that "love" as a verb and "love" as a noun can be an important distinction to make--to take a possibly clearer example, "hold" as a verb and "hold" as a noun.

Why would you want this?? If the computer agrees with you, and spits out what you want, why go through the bother? This is a really serious question as you note in your next sentence!!!

See, here again...I want you to really think through when it is a good idea to anthropomorphize a "system" or a "machine."

What happens if you disagree with a coder? Are these two questions related in your mind (computer v. coder)? They should be...

...because the humans don't agree, you mean?

What is "this" here? Tell the difference between those two phrases?

...in context.

This here is not a "replacement" to be taken lightly. I feel sure you know it. The Amazon reviewer who is the subject of Christine's research isn't the same sort of being as the character of Jane Eyer--on any number of very important levels.

Might be worth reframing this as a conversation or a collaboration rather than a battle...is that possible?

What was it???!!

You can also put your topics in Voyant.

Fascinating metaphor.

We definitely should talk more about this.

Again, do watch out for accusations of confirmation bias. Computer boys love to come down on humanists for this (we talk in the "Roles" paper about this...you're reading it for the Monday after break)

Yeah, but to the trained reader, it can also just "point." If we ask LDA to point out patterns in a corpus that is unfamiliar, we can still gain utility...so long as we do not feel that the computer sees something we would see if we tried long enough. No, this is a collaboration with an alien, and sometimes that's helpful to see outside our assumptions.

It didn't. There's just some utility in this model of the text.

Amazing.

This is good dissertation fodder.

Is it that they didn't understand or they were hopeful that they'd make big bucks if their copyright was approved no matter what?

It's that the notion of "value" is slippery and your connection between "value" and "language" is ill-defined.

Here, and above...why not take advantage of hypertext to offer a link rather than asking us to scroll down? This is, after all, not a book or a scroll in actual fact :)

You have the best research subject.

Interesting. Were the govt officials seemingly aware of ths?

By voice, you've told me that you know what this actually implies, but the way you've written this here implies that you're naive to the fact that LDA is gesturing towards the fact that what is NOT copyrightabke has been mentioned as much as what IS copyrightable.

OF COURSE NOT. This would imply that the computer is giving you the answer when that isn't what is going on.

Yes, but such is the nature of all interpretive work. It "depends" on what YOU think. So, do be clear about that. We can accept or reject your premises, but if we don't know what they are, we can't engage at all.

OK, I'd like you to know that right here, I'm left totally hanging about those topics. I don't understand them at all in the way that you do, and you've moved on to another idea!! It's frustrating, frankly.

Why 20? This is seriously a "hot" topic. How many words do you need to summarize a summary??

BTWs, I'm not pushing back on your choice of five...I just have no reason here to believe you apart from "your word."

Evidence?

Evidence?

Why? How? Think of this work like textual explication...the readers should not be expected to see what you see, indeed, we're here wondering what you (the expert) see.

Did you do this because there were "too many" numerals? If so, what does that tell you about your corpus? Where are the numerals?

By the end of this, do figure this out.

That do what? That are designed how? In a published paper, there would almost certainly be a note (or a GitHub reference) that suggests what techniques these "some" Python scripts implemented.

In future iterations, short paragraphs telling us what YOU see in these topics will be helpful.

Par for the course...and will be as you learn each new tool and technique. Difference might be that you later just take this as a given.

You have the best research topic, evar.

Yes please!

Nice. Yes. This is a good plan...but maybe do a little more reading of the passages Voyant pointed out to you as well.

But you've not yet taken Voyant's "advice!"

No!!!! You aren't finished but you ARE suceeding.

Yes! So, now the computer has "found them all" for you. Go and look. See what the computer has pointed out. Make meaning from its help.

Might I suggest that the "number of time someone references sound" is a pointer to something interesting rather than proof of something interesting. What you do with that pointer is the key element to your research!

So, a finding! Perhaps a disappointing one...but a finding all the same.

At this point, I'd be very interested to know--how would you, Mehul, know when you were seeing something in a computer output that you are "missing" through your own reading of these texts. I don't mean this as in "it is impossible for a computer to show you something you missed," I mean this quite literally. How do you recognize something you didn't know? And where does that recognition happen?

Are you satisfied with this finding? How might you integrate it into a larger study?

Notable word.

It would be fantastic if this information were skillfully weaved into your argument without just plopping in your whole method. If you'd like to talk more about how best to do this, do not hesitate to make an appointment to chat!

"are not prevalent." But here again, you are tacitly rather than explicitly relying on the number of references to imply importance. Is that your mindful choice?

Ah, so the context found in the work matters...how do you plan to bring this into your study? I think it's important and will enrich your findings.

Where? How? Channel your inner art historian and offer up some formal analysis of these graphs for us so that we can be sure we see what you see.

OK. So if the experiences are not "mostly" about sound, does that mean sound takes a backseat to sight? That argument surely might hold water, but is it what you mean? What valence are you ascribing to a "count?"

My advice for the next iteration: consider much more deeply how much you are expecting your reader to "read your results off the graphs," rather than you telling us how you have found what you have found. You don't want to leave it this way, as I may have a completely different interpretation of the figures!

How?

What ARE they about???

Nope...the passages have the words you've identified. It is really important to ensure that you are not overstating your claim.

of what? how? Perhaps yesterday's conversation about how visualizations only do what the creator wishes for them to do--and sometimes don't even help make sense--can create a better understanding of how to contextualize "graphs ("Trends")." What type of graph? What does "Trends" do?

I can tell you're going to get into this, but the rhetoric here is that "running Voyant" told you something. But Voyant is a series of discrete tools. Which ones did you choose and why? Instrumentalizing the toolset as a type of deus ex machina isn't the strongest way to start providing evidence for your hypothesis, if you see what I mean?

This sentence would be stronger if it ended "...to include [other professions? other genders? you tell us!]"

There's a technical term for this...and it's probably worth using alongside this great definition. It is stemming.

What scholarly texts have you been reading that might help you out with models? I feel quite strongly that you've not yet engaged with the words in these texts--you appear to still be thinking of the texts as meaningful...so the words must be, but that connection is not as clear as you seem to assume. Why would "shared words" imply "shared meaning?" People do not really parrot one another, and also the context of a word is almost as important as the word itself.

What is your model of the text that allows the Voyant tools to help you make the meaning you want to make? How does comparison enter this picture?

Keep going for sure--I might even suggest you make your next iteration a report on what "sentiment analysis" really and truly is-- but you seem to be wandering around still, thinking perhaps that the computer will give you an answer. You will need to do a lot more pre-processing for the computer to help you find the answers you might seek.

What is sentiment analysis? What parts of it are you adopting and what parts of it are you not?

I can tell you that it is not "word counting" which is what you do before, so I think you have a lot more work to do here connecting this theoretical model of the text with your approach thus far. You can do it!

I'd like to hear more about this, both in terms of the assumptions you were bringing in from your past experiences/expectations of publication, and how working with these tools has changed your mind.

...but I thought the point was "religious" language? Was this an intentional shift that I missed?

These are visualizations of the whole texts? What pre-processing did you do?

Did you mean to repeat this?

Is this critical to your interpretive frame?

Which is what?

Do keep this in the forefront of your mind, Emily, OK?

This section is excellent. Thank you so much for all of this great metacognition!

Please don't spend any more time now thinking about this! Focus more on really getting to know the tools, using Jane Eyre as something like a "test case."

I still recommend this. Once you get your head around how some of these tools work and what they can and cannot do, expanding your capta to include other texts will be very important.

But it is a good place to start, and you definitely still have things to learn about it! I would really recommend that you focus on getting to know all that it can do.

All of this is great! I recommend that you start moving from "tinkering" to "argument generation" more seriously during the next iteration. The capta has shown you patterns, now it is up to you to tell us what those patterns mean in context.

This could use further clarification and explication, and I'm looking forward to hearing about it over the next round of iterations!

I think that there could be summative visualizations that help you demonstrate this quite directly--I recommend that you try them during this next iteration!

Ah, no, you mean the world's fairs??

These are art sales fairs?

OK, does the V&A material show up here due to there being a dedicated agent?

What? The likelihood of the pattern of sales and donations??

I think that I could use more work distinguishing "sales" from "donations." Are all "donations," donations from collectors that bought the tiles via "sales?"

...and that's surprising. Or, ...and that makes sense because [BLANK]. I would advise you, especially in the web context, not to build up un-interpreted findings awaiting a large-scale conclusion. Say what the evidence means as you go.

??

receipt

You mean that Smith was an agent for the V&A and the others collected for themselves? It might be worth considering in what ways personal collectors saw their habits as being personal and in what ways they saw them as being "public" or "for the public good." Shirin Fozi has experience thinking through these issues!

I don't fully understand this. Please say more and write out/present both your evidence and your interpretation more fully.

Do you buy that number of links is a proxy for "significance?" If so, why?

Highlighted how? The darker circles? When it comes to explicating figures, it is critical to consider it to be your job to perform a type of formal analysis. Please don't assume that your readers see what you see. You want to demonstrate what you have done, seen, and interpreted from your evidence.

Is it solely their "identification" that is important? Or is it putting them into a meaningful relationship to one another that is important?

Seriously, Mehul. Consider how you hold yourself back with a "fixed mindset" around success and failure being (a) dichotomous and/or (b) important.

Given your brief lit review above, surely it will have to be that making the written word a bonafide proxy for the spoken word is, in itself, fraught with peril, is it not? The written word and the spoken word are not the same performatively or rhetorically...so how are you going to work with that? I think it's possible, but am interested in your approach.

I wonder if for the next iteration you might not work with your own visualizations of these stories, a bit along the lines of the Knowles et al. piece from the other week, or even this week's "Sandcastles" reading.

"Failure" is a very strong word. You are working iteratively to figure something out. There is no failure there until you quit without reaching a conclusion you are satisfied with.

You took out "the" as a stop word eventually, right?

What is the evidence you can provide me to show me what you did, how you interpreted what the computer showed you, and how it was not helpful? You say it was not helpful--and while I believe you, good interpretive research does not rely on the reader believing the scholar. Evidence is required!

Oooh. What do you mean by this?

Which is something you learned in part from trying the tools, no?

Ah, why! A negative result can be just as useful as a positive one for a researcher.

Thrilling! Could you say a bit more about how? Is it solely due to "length?"

Could you say more about the distinction you are making between "stories that contain all kinds of information" and "memory?"

Interesting! How does she do this, and can you use the same techniques?

I really appreciate this "lit review" approach!

I want to make sure I follow. Is this a restatement of your claim, "Several scholars have successfully studied mnemonic techniques as an oral skill to store knowledge?"

I hear you on this, but the remaining sentences in this paragraph do not directly support your claim. It talks about other things that you need to do...but not why thinking with and through tools (that may or may not work) wasn't instrumental in getting you to this point.

Very interesting!!! Please don't expect change to happen over night. The process of learning and knowledge production happens iteratively, over time (even over a career). Keep up the mindful reflection! There will be highs and lows.

??

Why are these results not here?

What are these words and how do you know they "shouldn't count?" See my comment above about "mask(s)" in your word cloud.

But you haven't? So why would I listen to the next part of your sentence...do you see what I mean, rhetorically speaking?

In what way can you argue that Amazon is or is not a social media platform itself?

Great! How? Why? On what evidence and using what interpretive methods?

Would you need to associate this data with particular Amazon usernames?

This makes intuitive sense to me, but you haven't provided me any evidence for why you have come to this conclusion.

Smart.

OK, great. Are these words you've identified in advance or words you are willing to use digital tools to discover? It's unclear what your order of operations has been--or what you would ideally like it to be.

Wait what whoa?? Really? "Unfortunately?"

What work is "and" doing in this sentence for you?

Again, are digital public spheres "non-traditional" in 2021. Or do you just wish to make a strong distinction between meatspace communication and digitally mediated communication?

Are there non-commercially-owned digital communication spheres? If so, which? In either event, what is the distinction you might make here between "digital" and "commercial?"

In what ways does "reoccurring" imply "significance?" Do be precise here. "The" is a frequently recoccuring word and yet its significance varies greatly depending on the researcher's context, no?

Great question! Who, besides you, wishes to scrape out "all" the Amazon reviews from a product page?

Overall, for the next iteration, I'd like you to continue your analysis of these reviews (obviously), but also pay a bit more mindful attention to the ways in which your medium of expression affects your message!

This section is very hard to read. I am not sure how to proceed with reading. As with graphic novels, there are ways to ensure a clarity of logical flow without needing there to be successive traditional paragraphs. You might want to look into those habits and techniques!

Again, given that this is a methods course...how?

This is incredibly key.

How do you contextualize this in the boundaries of the debate you are framing?

This is intriguing. What do you mean precisely? I think YOU know, but your words here leave me to fill in a huge set of knowledge gaps.

This is unclear to me here. In retrospect I think you mean, "language that clearly situates the reviewer in political opposition to those who would not vote for DJT." Is that right? If not, do clarify, and if so, consider clarifying your words-to-meaning connection.

How? By reading them with your eyes? Whatever the method is fine, but do be specific (here and below).

To what end? To undercut them?

Indeed. This seems to be a reflection of the dominant narrative about these masks. I wonder--in what way do you see your own work contributing specifically to the better understanding of WHY this is true? This belongs in the thesis as well.

Why???? I suspect you'll get into this down below, but why the cliffhanger? Is a sense of suspense something you're trying to create? If so, to what end?

I'm truly confused here about where this comes from. Is this from Amazon or you! I only really suspect it is you because of the small size of the words to the right!

These words are about the same size and font as your image of the Amazon page to the right creating visual confusion about what I should pay attention to. Your actual words are tiny in comparison to the words originally found on Amazon's site, so on first glance, I'm inclined to ignore you and focus on these other more prominent, and colorful images/texts. Is this what you are trying to do?

Please say more!

I might argue that this is now "traditional," and therefore unsuprising. Can you create a frame for this argument that convinces me otherwise?

Why non-traditional? What's traditional?

I find this band of image/text very difficult to read and also I find it difficult to understand my best engagement with this part of your work, FWIW.

At first glance, including the term "mask(s)" skews this word cloud in favor of the mundane. Is that your goal? Also, just as a point of reference, Word Clouds are notoriously compromised visualizations for general purpose use, so I would be interested to hear more about your interpretation of what this shows!! Here are a few references about the complexities of this viz:

https://www.alida.com/the-alida-journal/pros-and-cons-word-clouds-visualizations

https://dhs.stanford.edu/algorithmic-literacy/using-word-clouds-for-topic-modeling-results/

So this happens second? Or is it simultaneous?

Is it the product that encourages polarization...or the product in the context of Amazon's platform for user interaction?

Great! You do this! Very much looking forward to your deepening engagement with this process.

Why is this not an alternate definition of the phrase, "making art?"

The next time, the next tool, will be easier!

Wonderful!

I think your redesign is really good for the purposes of this course. Congrats on your ongoing engagement with Omeka.

Ah, scraping? "Scrapping" is to throw something away somewhat contemptuously.

For the purposes of this class, a greater recognition of the pros and the specific cons of this access would be great to hear.

Right here, Sojin, I desperately want to see what you mean with inserted figures--or at least hyperlinks to examples that I can understand. You are your own publisher here, yes! So, the burden of conveying your meaning is not only word-based as it might be with a typewriter or a handwritten paper. You have an entire digital computer with connections to all of these images. Please use them to help you convey the depth and importance of your research in the most effective ways possible!!

You mean the physical materials, but once digitized...how "exclusive" are their holdings???

The distinction between an "actual" and a "proposed" artist's book means what? Is this not an essential part of the work, but is instead only in the eye of the beholder?

Ooh. Cool. Why would this help you though? I believe it will...but again, don't gloss over the process. Be tediously precise, if you can.

Good. Yujin has spurred you to get much closer to the point of performativity...so do the same for why/how language does this and how that then supports your definition of an artist's book.

By what precise mechanism? Mainly the "breaking of the fourth wall" in the exercises? Autobiography and historical narrative are pretty traditional! I think you're onto something here, but haven't quite yet figured out what it is exactly. Keep going!

?????

You say why in the next sentence, but here...it seems like a big assumption/thesis/hypothesis! Consider a new ending to this sentence, "...language operates at the core of the experiment because [a few words from you].

Ah! This here isn't part of your original definition of an artist's book (that it isn't traditionally printed).

Well, is it not that this is a hypothesis, and you are looking for evidence? Otherwise put, what's the difference in your mind between an assumption and a thesis?

I'll be interested to hear if this definition remains the same after your conversation with Kate. It's going to be a tricky genre to define, I feel, and so it will be very important for you to fully believe in your definition.

Thanks for all of these. I look forward to seeing how you interpret your results in the next iteration.

Feel free to set up a time to talk this through. I'm happy to help. You aren't solely sent to your home alone to fight through this! You're sent to your home alone to fight until you hit a wall, then you show me the fight and the wall, and I help (so far as I can) over the wall, and the whole thing starts again!

I hope this also is a learning experience for you in a school of computing and information--there really are still computationally-intensive things that happen. The "computer boys" have access to machines that would make Adobe run at the speed of light, but that means little to you in your home...

Wonderful.

Yes, but it can point the way.

So here you think the commonality will skew results, when above, the product names (and their specificty) will??

OK, good. But WHY would your choice do this?

Why these things? You say what they are but not why you removed them, I feel. Why do tangible things get excised?

How do you plan to get around the "known pitfall" of confirmation bias here?

Yes, this computers can do VERY QUICKLY. That is, they tell you that what you thought you had is not what they "see."

Right. So consider your earlier statements misleading.

Do watch your words here. Do the tools identify values?

Did MALLET make inferences?

I mean, this is adorable so surely that's value?? :)