Today’s workshop preview comes from the workshop’s leader, Marcus Bingeheimer of Temple University. He’ll be running a workshop on an open source text mining tool called Voyant, and has provided the following preview.
How many books do read in a week? One? Two? Perhaps two or three thousand, that is, in 30 years. What about the other hundred million? One of the promises of digital text is that it will be possible to use larger corpora for research, by finding patterns or discrete items of information across thousands of texts. Attempt of “Distant Reading” (Moretti) are technologically mediated; besides corpora of digital text one needs software tools to analyze and vizualize them. Voyant Tools (voyant-tools.org/) is a free, online suite of tools that is develped to let Humanities scholars explore digital text in various ways. After a short introductory lecture on the functions of the online interface, participants can try things out. I will prepare some corpora to work on, but encourage participants to bring their own digital texts (preferable as plain text or xml). 

The workshop will run from 2:45-4:15pm in a room TBD.