Text Analyisis and Digital Tools

In today's lab we took a look at different types of text analysis and digital tools. I was a part of Team Starbuck, and we took a look at the New York Times Visualization Lab and how this website can be used as a source for text analysis.

The New York Times Visualization website is a program that allows people to use various forms of analysis. The type of data you can use to analyze using the tools available consists of the New York Times articles because this website strictly looks at these articles and provides different forms of digital tools.The information that one can extract from the data include word frequency, word counts, word consistency, word associations, maps, charts, graphs, and a summary of statistics. The website permits users to upload files to submit different types of text analysis that the users created. One question that was drawn to the group's attention immediately was why only certain types of tools come up for certain pages and not others.

This website was fairly simple for any person to utilize, although I found that I have to play around with the website. The population that is interested in the New York Times magazine can access this visualization page to gather and retain more information about the articles that are present in the magazine. Students that are researching an article can utlize this website for a better or simpler understanding of the article. The website might also be used by scholars and professors, people with an interest in literature or pop culture, historians, geographers,or it can be viewed for fun. It is a good visualization source and it is easy to comprehend the information given. If an individual was unaware of the articles in the magazines, that individual would not have a difficult time following through the website, but it would be simpler to find an article that appeals to one's interest. The website also includes the full articles with the analytical and digital tools. Unfortunately, depending upon the type or article one chooses to ake a close look at, only particular forms of text analysis will be available.

An example of this would be the article referring to Barack Obama's inaugaration speech. Due to the fact that there were not any statistics noted in his speech, charts, graphs and maps were not the forms of text analysis used. Instead word clouds and word trees were used. These forms measured word frequency, word association, and word trends. In some of the files that users created, one can narrow down the search by specifically looking for a sections or word and finding all of the phrases related to the word. The reason that we chose this article as appose to others is due to our common interest, and that fact that it was an article that the group could recognize in terms of the person it was related to.

One point that I remembered was the fact that the number of analytical and digital tools were created by other users and maybe an individual ad a difficult time finding a different way to display other forms of text analysis or the person is creatively searching for a method to make all types of analysis be accessible for any text.On the website there were other articles where the analytical and digital tools were mainly statistics, and graphs. Some had a combination of both, but there was a lack of continuity. Each type of tool device can be useful depending upon what an individual is looking for or depending on the type of article it is. In terms of the Obama reading the I found that the word tree was the most useful, because it displayed different word variations, allowed a user to narrow down the search to a particular section of the article, and one can focus on the main phrases or points of the article.