Introduction to Distant Reading Techniques with Voyant Tools, Multilingual Edition

You have a collection of digital texts, now what?
This workshop provides a gentle introduction to
text analysis in the digital humanities using Voyant
Tools, a collection of free web-based tools that can
handle larger collections of texts, be they digitized
novels, online news articles, twitter feeds, or other
textual content. This workshop will be a hands-on,
practical guide with lots of time to ask questions, so
participants are encouraged to bring their own texts.
In the workshop we will cover the following:
1. A brief introduction to text analysis in the
humanities;
2. Preliminary exploration techniques using Voyant;
3. Basic issues in choosing, compiling, and preparing
a text corpus;
4. Text mining to identify themes in large corpora;
5. Ludic tools and speculative representations of
texts; and
6. Integrating tool results into digital scholarship.
This year’s workshop will pay special attention
to certain multilingual issues in text analysis,
such as character encoding, word segmentation,
and available linguistic functionality for different
languages. The instructors will present in English,
but can also present or answer questions in French
and Italian.
This is intended as an introduction to text analysis
and visualization. We hope for an audience with
a range of interests and relevant competencies.
Participants are expected to bring their own laptop
and are encouraged to bring their own texts.