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Voyant Exploration
I used Voyant to analyze two speeches: Michelle Obama’s final speech as First Lady of the United States, and President Barack Obama’s final speech as President of the United States. Voyant takes in text which becomes a corpus that is then analyzed for things such as word frequency, total word count, unique word count, etc. […]
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Why I Use Google Slides Now
As a scholar interested in visual rhetoric and design, I am acutely aware of every font choice, background image, and text color in presentations as well as how many opportunities there are to have a bad visual presentation. Maybe the font is difficult to read, or there is too much text crammed onto one slide, or […]
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Voyant – DNC and RNC 2016
I have recently had the opportunity to explore Voyant – an open-source, web-based application for performing text analysis. The two speeches I analyzed were Donald Trump’s RNC speech and Hillary Clinton’s DNC speech. My first step was to visualize the two speeches by entering a URL that linked to them in the Voyant text box, […]
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Project Announcement! Developing the FI Events Mobile App
As part of our mission at the Futures Initiative, we conduct research projects aimed at understanding the complexities of the higher education landscape. In past years, FI fellows have conducted various data-driven projects focusing on CUNY’s FI community. Graduate Fellow Michael Dorsch led the CUNY NYC Language Mapping Project to map the languages spoken across New York City […]
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Jake Tapper
I decided to use “Jake Tapper” as my Google search phrase, as I am a senior this year and it was just announced that he would be this year’s commencement speaker. When I searched his name in Google, the top of the search results page showed links with images to three recent news stories about […]
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Search Engine Algorithms
I recently performed the same search in two different search engines: Google and the Dartmouth College Library Catalog. Typing “how to” into google yielded five results of varying media. My first result was the wikiHow homepage; my second result was the Wikipedia page of the term “how-to”; the third result was the HowToBasic YouTube channel; […]
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The Black Panther Party and Algorithms
The phrase I searched to compare the algorithms between Google and the Dartmouth Library Catalog was “black panthers.” While I was pleasantly surprised that the Google results represented just (albeit, liberal) readings of the party, the library catalog’s results were certainly more in line with a racial revolutionary’s perspective on the party. […]
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Google or Library Search?
To Google or not to Google? Google took over the market for search engines, and instead of saying “just look it up online!” we say “just Google it!” But how different are results from Google and say a library catalog? To investigate this very simply, I did two different searches. I did a Google search of […]
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Quest for Chocolate
You never really realize how biased your own Google search is on your laptop until you’ve taken a step out of your bubble to compare the results. Everything you do on the internet is watched and recorded. Not only do the cookies you accumulate go towards this cloud of “you info”, but the permissions you […]
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Text Analysis: Underwood, Brett, and Posner
Brett and Underwood make many of the same distinctions in their discussions of text analysis or text mining. Both emphasize that the tools of text mining are usually applied to very large collections of works and data. Both also stress that there is inevitably going to be some level of human intervention. In other words, […]