Queens of Antiquity

Project Summary

Understanding how to generate, analyze, and work with datasets in the humanities is often a difficult task without learning how to code or program. In humanities centered courses, we often privilege close reading or qualitative analysis over other methods of knowing, but by learning some new quantitative techniques we better prepare the students to tackle new forms of reading. This class will work with the data from the HathiTrust to develop ideas for thinking about how large groups and different discourse communities thought of queens of antiquity like Cleopatra and Dido.

Themes and Categories
Interdisciplinary Inquiry
Data Expeditions, Digital Humanities
Year
2018

Graduate Student: Grant Glass

Faculty: Dr. Charlotte Sussman

Course: “Queens of Antiquity” (English 390S-7; Spring 2018)

Grant Glass taught this Data Expedition activity to students in ENGL 290, a spring 2019 course aimed at undergraduates. This experience exemplified that by introducing simple “distant reading” or qualitative concepts in a humanities undergraduate classroom, students would be able to use these tools to drive new types of research questions and think about how reading can include qualitative analysis.

The goals were to give students an introduction to “distant reading,” show how data and collections are created, what algorithms we can apply to those collections, and what types of analysis we can do from the results.

Over the course of two, 1.5-hour class sessions, 10 undergraduates were given the opportunity to create their own datasets and explore the results. For the end product, students created posts to discuss how the visualizations created from their collections helped them better understand.

Guiding Questions

  • What visualization is the most useful? Why?
  • What does the visualization help you understand about the corpus? What does it obscure?
  • What research questions can you generate from the visualization?

The Dataset

Dido

Elizabeth 1

Anne

Cleopatra

In-Class Exercises

Creating Collections with Hathitrust

Understanding the Visualizations

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Image credit:

J.M.W. Turner, Slave Ship, 1840, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (public domain)

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