In our third session we started with a discussion on web logging or “blogging” for academics – ensuing from the Chronicle of Higher Education article “3 Rules of Academic Blogging” by David Perry. The three rules according to Perry are:
(1) Pick the right platform. – With putting our seminar blog on the hypotheses.org platform we have ensured that.
(2) Write whatever you want. This point, we agreed, is arguable.
(3) Write for the sake of writing. – Or, in different words: Write so that it becomes less of an obstacle, especially when you have to write in a foreign language.
Then we familiarized ourselves with WordPress as the content management system that is used by hypotheses.org and created both profile pages for the seminar participants and bloggers and by posting the first articles on the blog roll!
The second part of the three hour seminar was dedicated to deciding which type of seminar we are going to have. We decided to go for a mix of a reading-heavy overview of digital humanities (broad, general knowledge of the field, its main ideas, concepts and methods) and individual small-scale projects.
Assignments for next week:
- Publish a revised version of your assignment 1 on the seminar “Blog”
- Make an appointment for supervision with your instructor
- Prepare for the “text analytics” session next week:
- We will work with the novel “A Study in Scarlet” by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Read the novel (if you haven’t read it already) or watch a film adaptation
- Make notes on the following questions:
- What is the novel about?
- What do you think are the main story features?
- Who are the main characters? Who is present the most?
- Which words and concepts do you think are important in the novel?
- Note your answers BEFORE you do the next steps!
- Paste this link https://www.gutenberg.org/files/244/244-0.txt into the VoyantTools website https://voyant-tools.org/
- Click on the “reveal” button
- What do you see? Describe as accurately as possible what VoyantTools displays
- Find out how to download or export the different views to save them
- Find out as much as possible about how VoyantTools works (use the “help” function on the site, search for information online, find a documentation)
- Compare the VoyantTools output with your own notes:
- What is similar?
- What is different?
- Did you expect any of the results?
- Think about an explanation for the results of your comparison.