Text
Content for Monday, July 15, 2024–Friday, July 19, 2024
Readings
- Rohan Alexander, “Text as data,” chapter 16 in Telling Stories with Data
- Look through some of the chapters in Tidy Text Mining (Silge and Robinson 2017) (but definitely don’t read them all! You just need to get a taste of what modern text analysis looks like.)
- A bunch of (really) short things:
- Evangeline Reynolds, “Federalist Papers”
- Julia Silge, “She Giggles, He Gallops”
- Abby Ohlheiser, “These are the words most associated with men and women, according to Facebook status updates”
- Six Ideas for Displaying Qualitative Data
- Word clouds considered harmful
- Word clouds cause death… or something
- When It’s Ok to Use Word Clouds
- The Class of 2011
- Every time Ford and Kavanaugh dodged a question, in one chart
- Tweet by @s_soroka
Possible questions to reflect on
Remember, you don’t need to answer all of these—or even any of them! These are just here to help guide your thinking. Write about whatever you want.
- Why is qualitative data difficult to visualize?
- Why are word clouds so problematic? When is (not) okay to use them?
Other resources
Check out this slide show demonstrating a bunch of different ways to visualize text, as well as this collection of 400+ different text visualization techniques (!!)
Slides
The slides for this week’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.
Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.
Videos
Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.
You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here: