The Dance Goes On: Project Update

Progress

As of the end of class Tuesday we have done our initial text processing in Voyant tools, which indicated to us we would need to do a bit more editing to the data in order to make it machine readable/effective in visualizing the program data. Our personal research has helped us begin making hesitant periodization we will use to structure our analysis of change over time.

Problems

In terms of real problems we have been relatively lucky up to this point. The one major issue has been that we were unable to break up the convo programs into individual chunks with Voyant tools because we had 140 documents and Voyant only makes 100 chunks, but by making individual documents for each test file we will be able to ingest them differently and hopefully circumvent this problem come Thursday

Tools & Techniques

We haven’t implemented any new technology yet, but are considering the possibility of using using Mallet or another topic modeling software to help make thematic groupings

Deliverables/Timeline

Completed:

• Initial research
• Tentative “phases”: Pre-Stoppage (1963-68), Stoppage-TBD (1979-?), TBD to Present (?-2020)
• Initial Voyant processing (which was quite messy)

To do before class Thursday: Copy and paste cleaned text into one document for each term, meet with Kerry Raadt (Wed 2:00pm)

Before Next Tuesday: Continue looking at Carletonian articles in order to develop a better sense of the “phases” of Convocation at Carleton

Still to do:

Visualization
Find a possible visualization tool which works well with text analysis, date TBD, we are now considering using Mallet/other topic modeling software to help with this

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.