Process Posts

​

Nov. 14, 2017

Today I spent some time writing reflections for Week One’s process posts. This task did not take very long, but I was sure to relate my process to my developing bibliography.

But most of my work today has been spent writing a response to the Introduction of Janelle Swartz’s Worm Work, reading Nicholas Crawford’s article “We’ll Always Have Paris,” and responding to Crawford’s article as well. For these responses, I decided to interweave precis and how each piece contributes to my own study. Though I did not originally plan to do so, in my response to Crawford I placed his article in conversation with not only my current study but also Swartz’s book. Because of this conversation of the two pieces, I have placed the tab for Crawford’s article under the tab for Swartz’s article on the Scholarship section of the website I am building. I hope that the placing of Crawford under Swartz will encourage website visitors to view my tab on Swartz before they explore the tab on Crawford. The narrative arc of my project largely hinges on the placement of material on the website, which is a notion I have done my best to consider during this entire process.

After responding to Swartz and Crawford’s scholarship, I added my responses to their pieces to my website and found a picture to accompany each response from Google Images. The cover of Swartz’s book is the picture I selected for the page of the website that features my response to Swartz, but unfortunately since Crawford’s piece is an article and not a book I could not do the same for his piece. Instead of a book cover, I found a picture of worms to accompany my response to Crawford’s piece that I believe matches the tone and content of my response. Overall, I would estimate that I spent a little over two hours working on this project today.

​

Nov. 15, 2017

Today’s post is short, but I spent an hour this evening responding to Dr. Pascoe’s edits on last week’s process posts. I have revised grammatical errors she pointed out and added clarification to certain sections of my posts that describe my work in Voyant. In particular, I tried to make the sections about the Bubbleline chart and the original search I made on what words appear near “worm” in all ten texts lengthier and clearer.

Dr. Pascoe also asked on the weekly feedback from her I am receiving for this project if I am using Zotero to create the bibliography for this project. So, I spent part of my hour of work today downloading and exploring Zotero. However, Zotero does not seem to do anything I do not already do with Google’s bookmark function and then putting sources into MLA citation style on my own. My bibliography for this project is not extremely extensive because the fifty texts that I will eventually be analyzing in Voyant out of the confines of this semester are the bulk of the texts I need to interrogate. For these reasons, I do not think I will use Zotero for this project – especially because I already have a very routine way of making citations – but Zotero may be of benefit to me in future projects.

​

Nov. 16, 2017

Putting information up on the website for this project is the feeling arguably the most rewarding because I have begun to see actual, tangible progress being made towards my findings. Today I spent approximately two hours adding to this project’s bibliography, putting what I have of the bibliography so far on the website, finishing the Reflection section for the first week’s process post on the website, and reading up a little on R. I have decided that on the website I will label my bibliography a “Working Bibliography,” at least for now, because the bibliography does not feel complete yet. I am not sure how many more texts I will add to the bibliography this semester, but I would really like to continue to add to it in the future. The more bibliographical research I put into this project, the more grounded I feel in the broad field of Digital Humanities and the specific work of text analysis. I also wanted to go ahead and put what I have of the bibliography so far on the website so that I can get a sense of the format it will have to take. For example, I quickly discovered that the tab button on the keyboard does not work on Wix and there is no hanging indent option, so I will have to alter my bibliography from how one traditionally looks when constructed in a Microsoft Word document. Nevertheless, I believe I have still formatted the bibliography on the website to be easily readable and academic in style.

As for the second reflection I added to the first week’s process post on the website, these reflections are becoming one of my favorite aspects of the project. I am enjoying getting to pair my bibliographical research with the hands-on work I am completing in the process posts. Also, this space of reflection is allowing me to evaluate what I have done well and what I would revise in similar, future projects. I decided to pair with my bibliography sources on Archives and Archiving both of my reflections on week one’s process posts because during week one I gathered my corpus of texts in Hathitrust to analyze in Voyant. I will not repeat my thoughts here on these reflections, because they can be viewed on the tab for week one’s process post, but in retrospect, the archive I chose to pull my texts from has quietly dictated my corpus, arguably the most significant variable in my study.

Lastly, I decided while I was on the topic of my bibliography to go ahead and read up a little on R today. I did not get too far, but I quickly realized that the original sources I had on my bibliography for R were not for extreme novices. However, one of my sources in my bibliography on R from Programming Historian linked me to an article for beginners, Taryn Dewar’s “R Basics with Tabular Data,” which is also from the website Programming Historian. I have not decided if I should actually download R’s software or only read about the process of using R (I plan on asking Dr. Pascoe about this tomorrow because I have a scheduled meeting with her at 2 pm), so for tonight I simply read through Dewar’s article. R definitely seems a lot easier to use than Voyant to analyze texts once the user is comfortable with the software; however, I also believe there is a much more significant learning curve using R rather than Voyant. In an earlier process post I related the thought of learning R to learning a foreign language and realized tonight that Dewar makes the same comparison. In contrast, I would not compare using Voyant to the difficulty of learning a complete foreign language, but rather just learning new software similar to software I have read from or used in the past.

​

Nov. 17, 2017

I met with Dr. Pascoe today for a half hour to discuss my progress on this project, the direction this project is taking, and to edit my Statement of Intent. Dr. Pascoe gave some helpful suggestions for places I may want to elaborate more upon in my Statement of Intent as well as pointed out some wording that was unclear. The Statement of Intent is what visitors of my website will view before any other website tab, so I am relieved to feel that this statement is more polished now.

Dr. Pascoe and I also discussed my learning R. I believe that learning R will be of benefit to me in the future for this project, especially after the previous advice I had been given on this, and was happy to find that Dr. Pascoe was supportive of this endeavor. I downloaded R’s software on my laptop after leaving Dr. Pascoe’s office. I wanted to make sure I could download R (since I have already faced issues downloading Voyant’s software for this project). But R downloaded to my computer, so there are no issues with R yet. Next week I plan on beginning to learn how to use R. Unfortunately, this process will be separate from analyzing my corpus in Voyant, and I will be analyzing R’s general sample data while learning the code. But eventually R will be the better method for analyzing my own data on worms.

Downloading R and editing my Statement of Intent as well as other portions of the website after leaving Dr. Pascoe’s office took approximately a half hour. The edited version of my Statement of Intent is now on the website and I am excited but nervous to begin working with R in the coming week.