a tango with convo: convocation keyword themes from 1963-2005

The members of our motley crew are: Spencer Lekki, Chloe Truebenbach, and Cecilia Kryzda.

Our project objectives are twofold: we seek to compare the keywords, themes, host departments to general descriptions and purpose statements about Convocation. Further, we would like to observe changes in Carleton’s institutional ideas of importance. From a cursory skim of the documents, we want to see if Carleton has invited less speakers on literary and musical topics than in the past, and more social justice and political-consciousness-oriented speakers than in the past.

Methodology

We have already located these resources from the Carleton convo website, and, for earlier convos, from archival material gleaned from Nat Wilson and Nicole (from our class!) in the Carleton Archives. We conducted an initial hands-on read-through of the physical documents. We then scanned the entire folder of Convo brochures since 1963, using OCR. Our next step is to run the data through Voyant, after looking through additional documents with our very own eyes. At this point, it will become a more traditional humanities project. During the course of the project, we will pay close attention to the differences and similarities in our findings when we use our brains versus the computer tools to find patterns and significance in the data. With Voyant, we expect to find high frequency words, look at trends in the data over time, and otherwise play with text mining in the program. We are still trying to figure out exactly how we want to show the data, but we are considering using the examples below for inspiration for visualizing our data.

Timeline:
Other Sources (aka the HUMAN BRAIN)
Traditional readthrough of sources given by Nat
By class Tuesday: everyone reads all the extra sources

More material:
Cecilia: set up a meeting with Kerry about convo
Spencer: look through Nat’s link
Chloe: look through Carletonian for mentions of convo

Initial Text Analysis (aka the COMPUTER BRAIN)
Start working on analysis using Voyant in class Tuesday

Visualization
Find a possible visualization tool which works well with text analysis, date TBD

Writeup
After having done the analysis and visualization, we will divide the writing summary into segments.

Presentation
We will compile the visualization and make a PowerPoint presentation that details the project’s process and results.

Process Examples
Max Kerman’s Blog Looking at Emails: https://digihum.mcgill.ca/voyant/about/examples-gallery/
British Library Blog on British Cartoon Archive: https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/05/on-metadata-and-cartoons.html
Product Examples
Signs@40 archive topics over time http://signsat40.signsjournal.org/topic-model/
Robots reading Vogue (product using MALLET)
http://dh.library.yale.edu/projects/vogue/topics/