I’m not very experienced with coding / programming / quantitative data analysis and I’ve been working with mostly qualitative data and so I was looking into what my options are for beginner-friendly data visualization that apply to qualitative data. I saw in Tooling Up For Digital Humanities: Data Visualization that word clouds might be a good fit for a data set I’ve been working with given the stage I’m currently at in analyzing that data. I tried making a word cloud in python but I haven’t tried coding in python in years and I couldn’t successful install the package that was needed for it to work. I was using a notebook in my Anaconda cloud account to avoid having to download the Anaconda navigator onto my computer but I might try it again after I install it. But honestly there’s a lot of word cloud generator tools out there that seem pretty simple to use so it might not be worth my time trying to create one in python. I was able to easily copy and paste my data into the generator on https://www.freewordcloudgenerator.com and it gave me this. I feel like it cut off some of the words though and I’m not sure how to fix that so I might try another generator. 

I also tried analyzing the same data set (they’re TikTok comments) on Palladio. I couldn’t do much since it seems to be a tool designed for quantitative data visualization or at least I couldn’t access some of the features that I might be able to use later once I have the results of my qualitative data analyses but I was able to just use the one quantitative variable (number of likes each comment got) to create something in it.  I liked how it lets me visualize all of the comments in one place and move them around and set the node sizes to be bigger for the comments that got the most likes. 

I think once I finish some of the qualitative coding I plan on doing on these TikTok comments I can see data visualization tools being really helpful for helping me see the patterns in the data, since “the goal of information visualization is to discover the structure of a (typically large) data set. This structure is not known a priori; a visualization is successful if it reveals this structure” (Manovich, 2010). I’m also really interested in how data visualization tools can help me with the task of demonstrating  how epistemological violence shows up in these comments. A Review of “Two Plantations” mentions how the discussed data visualization project, “produces a conversation within the site or among users visiting about who and what is missing… It is both what is present in the history and what is not that resonates with users”. I also need to figure out how to show what isn’t there, how to provide the necessary historical context to show the gaps in the discourse I am analyzing and showing the systemic reasons why the “more reliable sources” people kept asking to provide them in these comments don’t exist.