Datamining Oh, the Humanities! Blog

            Distant reading uses computer programs to analyze a lot of text at once. We took three blog posts and put them together as one to do a distant reading of them. We inserted the combined the blog posts into a website called Voyant. This website provides information such as the most common words used, the connections between words, and patterns that would not typically be noticed during close reading. The blog posts we used were: Tribe's Uncreative Writing, Tribe response to Ray Kurzweil, and Tribe's Response to Video Games. 

Google Ngram Viewer

List of the most used words in the blog

After we used the Voyant Tool website, we researched the three most common words that we used. The 3 most common words used in our blog posts were "people", "video", and "games". Being that our blogs expand on topics about Digital Humanities, it is not surprising that these are the most common words. The graph above shows our findings in Ngram Viewer, and what we found is quite interesting. As you can see, the word “people” goes pretty far back and has quite an impact.  “Video” and “games” were not nearly as popular as “people” is. The word “video” started gaining traction in the last forty years or so. This is around the time where digital cameras could start taking videos and computers and specialized players like the VHS player could play movies and other types of videos. “Video” did see some use in the more distant past, but that is only because the word video is very similar to a word in Latin “video” which in Latin means to see. This is probably why nowadays we call the moving pictures with audio, videos. We took the word from Latin.  

Another way of visualizing the most used words in the blog

The word “art” also came up as one of the top words we used in our blogs. The word “art” is a very difficult word to define. It is one of those words where you know what could fit it, but you could not give a complete definition. A whole lot of the basic words in English are similar. Someone can see a sculpture or painting and know that it is art, but not know what makes it art. Another huge problem with the word “art” is what falls under its umbrella. Many people would say painting and sculptures do, but is it all of them or just a few ones? Would a relatively new form of media like video games fall under art, as well? Would regular games such as American Football, Baseball, and Hockey fall under art? Would Chess fall under art? This is just a taste of how deep the art rabbit hole goes.