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?