For the Text Analysis Praxis, I decided to use Voyant to look at Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice by Katerina Cizek, William Uricchio, and 12 other authors. Initially, I was searching MIT Press Open for a text that might be interesting and happened to run across the digital version of Collective Wisdom, which I already had the physical copy of, but have not read yet. My thought was, “I suppose I can do a ‘distant’ read before the ‘close’ read.

First, I filtered out the basic frequent terms, so that the Cirrus view would yield more useful results to inspect. They were what I expected given that the book’s subject matter. The most frequent words in the corpus being media (566); creation (524); new (432); film (378); and project (346). Other terms that I singled out to look more into were community, systems, documentary, journalism, and ai.

I toggled through some of the corpus and visualization tools. Speaking strictly on sheer fascination, the Bubbles tool was  amusing. I decided to leave the sound on too while the system cycled through the frequencies of the terms in the document. The links view was also of interest. Network displays of information are helpful when looking at correlations and relationships.

The context tool was helpful in exploring some of the terms that were also frequently used. Since the book has about 13 authors, I was curious if I would be able to identify the varied usage of certain terms. I saw this clearly when looking at community. At times the term was used in the first person, like belonging through personal heritage and others were more institution-based. There were instances that were observations or criticisms from outside of a community or against a particular community.

Other terms I investigated were:

Ai: I was glad to see it was largely referencing artists who were trying to utilize AI in their practice or attention to its harms where people of color are concerned.

Journalism: The context I pulled out was collaborative or co-creative use of journalism. In another class, I’ve become more familiar with data journalism and was interested to see how it may be used in the text.

Initially, I was concerned that I should have chosen a more meaningful topic for this assignment, but the 6th entry of the Data-Sitters Club, Voyant’s Big Day, reminded me that the text and reason for exploration don’t have to be profound. As a fan of the Baby-Sitters Club, I found this project to be a delightful surprise. Using Voyant to explore the series never crossed my mind. The questions that the post author, Katherine Bowers, mentions are a useful starting point when attempting a text mining project:

“Is close or distant reading the best approach for the questions you have?”

“Is the corpus complete? What are the characteristics of the corpus? What’s missing?”

“How does the data skew? What’s skewing the data?”

If I could create a manageable dataset for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, I would explore it like the Data Sitters Club did. For now, I am curious if my ‘distant’ then ‘close’ read will have any significant impact on my experience with Collective Wisdom.