Outcome 3a
Design resources or tools that facilitate access to information.
For Digital Humanities, LIS 783, the final project was a very open-ended one; create a “web-based digital humanities resource”. I was very intrigued during class by the possibilities of text analysis, and particularly an online tool called Voyant that is used by many humanities scholars to do simple text analysis. The corpus of texts that I decided to work with was a collection maintained by the National Archive called Public Papers of the Presidents, a collection of the public speeches and official communication of the presidents of the US, from Roosevelt to Obama (the collection ended in 2014 when I assembled my corpus, it currently extends to 2016). The digital resource consists both of a corpus of text that I created from the PDF downloads available from the Archive, that was uploaded to Voyant for analysis, and my research findings, which are presented here:
https://sites.google.com/view/thewordsofthepresidents/introduction
On the Google sites page I explain my methodology for processing the texts, my process for developing a research methodology, and the most interesting of my findings.
If, after reading about the corpus and the process, you want to explore it yourself, Voyant makes it delightfully easy to do so. Open up the Voyant tool preloaded with the PPP corpus from this link