Network Analysis

Before the session

Download

1. Cytoscape: Network analysis tool

Readings

1. Scott Weingart, “Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1:1 (Winter 2011).
2. Briefly Review: Social Network Analysis Glossary, Miriam Posner
3. Text as Data, Chapter 9
4. Explore: “Physical Traits that Define Men and Women in Literature” (Davis, 2020)
5. Explore “Lost in the City: An Exploration of Edward P. Jones’s Short Fiction” (Rambsy & Ossom-Williamson): Read “Introduction: Teaching Edward P. Jones” and the three sections in “Visualizing Edward P. Jones’s Short Fiction”

Tutorials

1. Finish lessons from Walsh (2021): “Python String Methods” and “Files and Character Encoding”.

During the session

Hour one: Network Analysis

Download the files TVShows2021.csv and Marvel_Affiliation_Matrix_Example.csv

Hour two: Named Entity Recognition (NER)

Named entity recognition (NER) is a method stemming from natural language processing (NLP) that helps us identify proper nouns within a text.

Related to NER is part-of-speech (POS) tagging, which helps us label the words in a text as parts of speech. This is helpful for when we’re interested in analyzing terms like adjectives, pronouns, verbs and other parts of speech with nouns or proper nouns.

The “Textual Geographies” project, led by Matt Wilkens, is one example of the result of this method.

Activity

Pair up with the person next to you.

Each group will return to one of the assigned readings for today:

• Group one: “Physical Traits that Define Men and Women in Literature” (Davis, 2020)
• Group two: “Lost in the City: An Exploration of Edward P. Jones’s Short Fiction” (Rambsy & Ossom-Williamson): Read “Introduction: Teaching Edward P. Jones” and the three sections in “Visualizing Edward P. Jones’s Short Fiction”

Discuss with your partner (12ish minutes)

1. What research questions motivate these projects?
2. What data are each of these projects working with? What do we know about who created the datasets and how?
3. What types of words (or entities) are these researchers interested in?
4. These open access publications are presented as interactive, multimodal digital projects. Do you find the visualizations effective? If so, in what ways? If not, what could have been done differently?
5. What questions do you have about the methods the researchers used?
6. Any other observations you’d like to discuss.

After the session

1. Reflection
2. Prepare tomorrow’s pre-session work (readings)