Blog 4: Information Visualization and Distant Reading
Chapter 6 and 7 along with the additional sources added to my understanding of digital humanities as a whole. The key part of chapter 6 was learning what information visualization was and how it is used. All information visualizations are metrics expressed as graphics. Part of everyday communications and scholarships. The book described it as data that can be difficult to interpret in tabular form. This is useful for seeing patterns within large amounts of information. Anything that can be quantified can be put into information visualizations. Making graphics by hand takes a lot of time. Two portions are metrics and graphics. There are helpful guidelines that can be helpful when deciphering what type of chart should be used. A fun fact is the earliest record of visualization was the observation of the planets and other natural cycles.
Chapter 7 discusses data mining and text analysis. Data mining is the automated analysis that looks for patterns and extracts meaningful information in digital files (Underwood 2017). It’s used as a part of research methods. Examples are text, music, sound recordings, images, and multimodal communications studies with tools customized for these purposes. Text analysis is a specialized subset of data mining that focuses on analysis of language (Schmidt 2013). Data mining, though, only takes place on the information literally in the file, so clarification about the process is a necessity.
The New York Times article featured a man named Franco Moretti, an Italian literary scholar and the founder of the Stanford literary Lab. He discussed the terms Distant reading and close reading. Basically, distant reading is understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data. Moretti claims we need distant reading because its opposite, close reading, can’t uncover the true scope and nature of literature. Whereas close reading a text, people look at both the text's content, and how the text says what it says with imagery and figurative language. I thought it was interesting how they used the word “close” since it was more commonplace and commonsensical compared to adjectives like “practical” and “intensive” even though these words are just as easily understood.
The website Six Degrees of Francis Bacon uses all these concepts in its layout. The data was visualized in forms of dots that represent a person and had strings that connected that person to another one. There was also an option to turn the dots into a table that clearly laid out what the information was and when it happened with a visualize button that would bring you to the dot. It was also distant reading since it studied all the connections, not just one singular one. My DH project was also distant reading since it was a collection of all sorts of European history, not just one section.
I like how you mentioned the difference between distant reading and close reading and how Moretti claims that we need to do more distant reading because it helps to uncover the true scope of the material at hand. When I read this in the textbook I thought it was very interesting and was never something that I had thought of before. I especially liked how you included the example of The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon to demonstrate the the concepts of information visualization and distant reading. It's such a cool project that transformed the modern social network we know today and is the reason why it continues to evolve and expand.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate you definitions of data mining and visualizations. Distant reading is a crucial tool for data mining because it takes all of the necessary information without taking up the amount of time a typical close reading takes. We are able to mine more data and analyze more data when interment the practice of distance reading. I used distant reading when analyzing my digital humanities project. My project contained hundreds of oral histories- some spanning up to one hour of content. I was able to use close reading and analyze the key information without having to spend hours listening to each oral history on the database.
ReplyDelete