Wow! Voyant is so powerful and accessible. Personally, I am really curious about what goes into building a tool like this.

The thing I enjoyed the most about exploring the text mining resources was actually looking through the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database. How rich! I think it would be really interesting to try to look through this specifically for Black newspapers throughout the country over time.

I had some “fun” looking at mentions of Palestine pre-1948 in Nebraska newspapers:

I played with entering some of these texts in Voyant as well as personal writing and cover letters. I found this tool easier to experiment with and reason about than the more at-large data vis tools, which makes sense because they are designed for a smaller subset of use cases.

As with our other praxis assignments, it’s hard for me to really get in the weeds and reason about the use of these tools without a defined problem or question to work through. I think so much of what is interesting about Digital Humanities are the lines of inquiry that open up to us when using these powerful tools, and I’m interested in better learning how to ask meaningful questions.