Week Ten: Text Analysis
Text-mining is helpful if you can use it to find a new source. Like if you were looking for sources for a research topic. It would be helpful to search you topic in a database, and then the database would find articles, books, etc. that are on your topic. This would be a system like Google Ngram. Google Ngram was interesting because it allows you to search for books on your topic. It shows how many books were written on this topic and in which years books were published on this topic. Google Ngram searches through its database and pulls books that you may not be able to find on other databases; however, it is only limited to those that Google owns. Although Wordle creates an interesting image it does not help much in the actual research process. It does not help you find any new sources, but only creates a collage of repeated words from the document. Although this is interesting I do not think I would ever use it in an academic setting. Finally Test Voyant did not help me because it did not help me find any new sources, or make sense of sources that I already have. Like Wordle it only documented words that appeared most often. Not in a collage, but in a list. Once again I would not ever use this in an academic setting.
I feel more confident this week in the direction my project will take,as well as what exactly I will be doing my research on. I started with a broad topic that included a large amount of information. My vague plan has been streamlined, and I have a set research goal in mind thanks to writing my research proposal a few weeks ago. Last weeks map was helpful in really outlining the project. I figured out exactly what I wanted my project on and how I would go about doing this research. I have had difficulties, however, on finding a wide arrange of diverse secondary and primary sources to be used in the research of my project. Omeka has helped me a lot in creating a way to easily cite all of the sources I have also discovered Jstor has also been helpful in finding a large amount of sources to be used for research. As I come to the end of my research I am now ready to start piecing out my information in order to answer my research question and really understand the history of the integration of the John Phillips Sousa Junior High School.