So this is what I made today! It is a word cloud from a year of NASA press releases from Kennedy Space Center in the 1960’s. Voyant is pretty easy to use, but I wonder how much it can be used to tell the story you want to tell, because one can simply delete and delete words until it looks interesting. I used Adobe Acrobat to make my pdf’s more readable, then created text files and uploaded them to Voyant. I think this might be a good tool to use when dealing with a massive corpus of original sources, which NASA definitely has. I am excited and curious about the possibilities this kind of tool represents in my research for space history. There is so much information available in the public domain, and this could really help me narrow down my topics, as far as primary sources are concerned.
Monthly Archives: April 2015
For next week
OK, I don’t want you all to go too far down the rabbit hole without seeing how programming would work for digital history, so as I mentioned in class yesterday, let’s hold off on the rest of the Codecademy lessons and jump into some digital history applications.
For next week,
- Read through the lessons on the Programming Historian, as well as Ted Underwood’s Underwood’s “Where to start with Text Mining.”
- Watch online interview with Bill Turkel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKZOz9CxMsU)
- Sign up for a free account at Wakari.io (https://wakari.io/plans) — bring username and password to class next Monday
Look around at the Old Bailey Online website, get a sense for what kind of historical information is stored there, and think about what kinds of historical questions you might be able to answer with the archive.
Then read through the Programming Historian, but don’t get too caught up in the code. Take a look at it, see if you understand any of it, and then move on. Focus more on the plain English instructions and the explanations of how this could be used for history.
On next Monday, I’ll step you through “Downloading Web Pages with Python” and “From HTML to List of Words” using your accounts at Wakari.io
Python
Okay, this Python programming is now wayyyy over my head. I don’t want to get behind, but I can’t do this without personal instruction. This self-teaching thing isn’t really working for me at this level. Totally stuck and frustrated. Feel sad.