Blog Post #4 (Kira Littlefield)

    In the Digital Humanities Coursebook by Johanna Drucker, chapter six gave readers an understanding of information visualization and how important it is for readers to get a better understanding of the topic at hand. Chapter six also touches upon networks, and complex systems, and how important they are for creating relationships between data. Chapter seven of the Digital Humanities Coursebook talked about data mining and analysis. Data mining and text analysis is an important tool within Digital Humanities as it is used to understand text or literature in a deeper way. Chapter seven also talked about the issues surrounding data mining, and how those issues may make the data found inaccurate. Our other readings for this week touched upon distant reading and close reading and the arguments for both of them and their uses. The projects "Six Degrees of Francis Bacon" and "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow" are visualization projects that use information visualization to give readers and or viewers a better understanding of the topic without becoming confused with all kinds of data. These projects also used distant reading in order for viewers to understand the literature in a data kind of way. These projects also seem to use networks in order for data and information throughout the projects to be connected. For example in the "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow" project you could filter by topic because they used networks to connect those topics and ideas to one another. 

    Using the Voyant tools for my own distant reading I feel would be helpful. Due to the fact that the Voyant tools give people the opportunity to understand text in a different way even if they are not good with different kinds of programming. Although it is said that if you want to use Voyant tools it would be good to know the text you are using them on, which I completely agree considering even though Voyant tools would give you all kinds of information you may not understand the information given if you hadn't had any prior understanding of the text. Voyant tools would just give readers a different view of the text they are trying to understand, which I feel could be helpful.