Numunu Family Tree

I read this article and wanted to write out my thoughts before they disappear on me! I really enjoyed the depth the authors took to describe the tools for a visual humanities approach to language. Obviously, I loved the voyant tool to create the word clouds. I feel like being able to visualize a text according to the frequency of word use is a really great way to look at a text rhetorically. I feel like language is an amazing way to see what is at the root of an individual or their ideas. in the article, the authors point out that studying the patterns that emerge from data sets can reveal not only the ideas of the individuals, but the ideals of the age, or the respondents. While I’ve never really done a lot of data analysis within a humanities context, I can definitely see the benefit. The authors made a comment that really resonated with me about the responsibility we as researchers have to our data, that is when we are working with data and categorizing we much take great care. I never really thought a lot about how we take categorizations for granted. when we just accept that the groupings we use are pre-generated we need to acknowledge that there can be human error in that pre-generation process.

Overall, I enjoyed this article…there were suggestions and descriptions of really useful tools that I will definitely be checking out in the future!