• Exercises

    • Exercise 1: Book Worm

      1. Go to the Hathi Trust Bookworm tool: https://bookworm.htrc.illinois.edu/develop/

      2. Search for some word trends that you are interested in (hint: use the + button to add more terms).

      3. Now go to Google nGram and search for the same terms. Are there any differences?

      4. Try doing the same at Early English Books Online's word search. (Accessible through the Senate House Library e-resources)

      5. Finally, see how these words appeared in web archives. Use the UK Web Archive word trend tool and try your terms.

      6. Now go to the Hathi Trust topic explorer at https://jgoodwin.net/htb/#/model/grid

      7. Use the GUI to investigate

      • Why does the GUI help?

      • Refer to the source texts to learn more.

      • Are the topics accurate in context?

      8. What can ascertain about the data sets available for each tool? Do you have a sense of where the material came from?

    • Exercise 2: Voyant Tools Data Visualisation

      1. Go to Voyant Tools (https://voyant-tools.org/).

      2. Place this link to Herman Melville's Billy Budd in the `Add text` box: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SASDigitalHumanitiesTraining/Visualisation/master/datasets/melville_texts/billy-budd.txt.

      3. Click Reveal.

      4. Examine the various widgets available to you: what statistics seem to be meaningful? Are there any surprises or problems with the results? Have you tried to enter various terms into a word trend graph?

      5. Now use your own txt file, upload it to Voyant, and compare the results to the previous step.

    • Exercise 3: Easy text markup with Markdown

      In the previous exercise you visualised all of Billy Budd. Now let's do some basic encoding of a manuscript page of the text.

      1. Access the first page of the novella (starting 'In the time before steamships') at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Houghton_MS_Am_188_%28363%29_-_Billy_Budd_manuscript_1.jpg

      2. Now let's use the txt file that you downloaded in Exercise 2 as the basis of your transcription. 

      3. Go to the Dillinger web Markdown editor (https://dillinger.io/), and review the Markdown syntax on the left-hand editing pane. Then clear that editing pane so that you can add your own transcription. 

      4. Add some basic headers, addition and deletion information, and anything else that might need to be recorded. (Here's a Markdown cheatsheet to remind you of syntax--hint: if you look at the extended syntax you'll see things like deletions.)

      5. Add some contextual features, such as footnotes.

      6. Export the transcription into PDF or HTML by clicking on 'Export as' in the top-right corner.

    • Previous Workshop recordings