Lab Session: Digital Humanities

In our recent digital humanities / corpus analysis exercise, Dr. Dilip Barad assigned LAB ACTIVITY. In which  we explored two web‑based text tools: CLiC and Voyant Tools. The goal was to see how they can assist with analyzing texts, discovering patterns, and drawing insights. In this blog I share my process, what I learned, and reflections on their strengths and limitations.

 VOYANT  see through your text

Getting Started

• I navigated to Voyant Tools (Voyant Tool)

• Voyant is a general text analytic environment for exploring texts or corpora.

• I uploaded / pasted a text (or corpus) into Voyant to begin analysis.

This how we find first page and various options to explore text👇

Learning Outcomes 

• Visualization helps get a “big picture” before diving into detailed textual evidence.

• Trends over the course of a text can point to narrative structure or shifts in thematic focus.

• Interactivity (clicking, filtering) is powerful for exploratory, iterative work.

• Exported frequency or collocation data can feed into further analyses 

Glimpse of  what i explore

CLic Activity Book - Material site

In this activity we have group of three people. so, we divide topic accordingly...

Khushi Raviya : Activity 11.1

Krishna Baraiya : Activity 11.2

Krishna Vala : Activity 11.3 and 11.4

Activity 11.3 The role of women in Sherlock Holmes

These are the step that i follow for this activity.

10. Start again. Go to the CLiC Concordance tab

(http://clic.bham.ac.uk/concordance).

11. Select The Sign of the Four in the “Search the Corpora” box, as before.

12. Under “Search for terms”, type the words woman and women. Select the

option “Any word” to search for both at once.

13. Read through the concordance lines: how are women described?

Emotional and intellectual traits: "But love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason" (Line 4). This could be interpreted as describing women as embodying emotions and contrasts to rationality.

Physical attributes: "one of the most charming young ladies I ever met" (Line 5). This shows women being described in terms of charm and youth.

Activity 11.4 Finding and exploring further themes 

14. Watch the BBC Bitesize video “Themes in The Sign of Four” at https://www.bbc.co.uk/education/guides/zx7mxnb/revision 

15. Choose another theme mentioned in the video ( I choose theme of Evil and Justice ) and look for related words or phrases in the CLiC concordance tab, following the proecdures set out in the Activities above.

In The Sign of the Four, the theme of Evil and Justice is explored through Sherlock Holmes’s cold, logical approach to crime-solving, as he views detection as a science: “Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner” (Line 19). However, the theme is complicated by Holmes’s own moral struggles, particularly his cocaine use: “Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and thrust the sharp point home” (Line 1). This highlights that even those pursuing justice can be consumed by internal moral conflicts, blurring the line between good and evil.

 Learning Outcome :

The overall learning outcome of this CLiC activity is to enhance students’ skills in analyzing literary themes by using digital tools to identify and explore patterns in text. Through this activity, students will develop the ability to recognize how specific words and phrases are connected to overarching themes in a novel. It encourages critical thinking, helps improve close reading techniques, and allows students to draw insights from textual evidence, deepening their understanding of how language shapes meaning and contributes to the development of themes in literature.

Take a test - Was this poem written by a human or a computer?

Learning Outcome 

Sometimes, it can be really difficult to tell whether a piece of writing was created by a human or a computer. This is especially true as AI technology, like GPT-4, has advanced to a point where it can generate text that closely mimics human creativity, style, and emotional depth.