Analysing and visualising texts

SunoikisisDC Digital Classics: Session 6

Date: Thursday February 27, 2025. 16:00-17:30 GMT.

Convenors: Kaspar Beelen (University of London), Gabriel Bodard (University of London), Megan Bushnell (Oxford Text Archive)

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/xNihExxxOy0

Slides: tba

Outline

This sessions introduces theory and practice of various digital methods for the exploration, analysis and visualisation of historical texts. We begin with theoretical discussion of quantitative, stylistic and computational linguistic approaches to text analysis, defining terms, some history of the discipline, and an overview of tools and codebases available. The second half of the session is a practical demonstration of using the Voyant Tools reading and analysis environment, showing examples in English, Latin and Greek and some of the visulaisation modules in Voyant. We end with a suggested exercise for students to take away and try in their own time, and a general discussion.

Required readings

• Hawkins, Laura F. 2018. “Computational Models for Analyzing Data Collected from Reconstructed Cuneiform Syllabaries”, Digital Humanities Quarterly 12.1. Available: http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/12/1/000368/000368.html.
• Rodda, Mar A., and Barbara McGillivray. 2024. “Computational Valency Lexica and Homeric Formularity.” Journal of Greek Linguistics 24(2). Pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.10795.

Further readings

• Peter Broadwell, Jack W. Chen & David Shepard. 2019. "Reading the Quan Tang shi: Literary History, Topic Modeling, Divergence Measures." Digital Humanities Quarterly 13.4. Available: https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/13/4/000434/000434.html
• Victoria Beatrix Fendel & Matthew T. Ireland. 2023. "Discourse cohesion in Xenophon’s On Horsemanship through Sketch Engine." Digital Humanities Quarterly 17.3. Available: https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/3/000683/000683.html
• Anjalie Field. 2016. "An Automated Approach to Syntax-based Analysis of Classical Latin." Digital Classics Online 2,3. Available: https://doi.org/10.11588/dco.2016.0.32315
• Robert Gorman. 2022. "Universal Dependencies and Author Attribution of Short Texts with Syntax Alone." Digital Humanities Quarterly 16.2. Available: https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/2/000606/000606.html
• Barbara McGillivray, Thierry Poibeau & Pablo Ruiz Fabo. 2020. "Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing: “Je t’aime... Moi non plus”." Digital Humanities Quarterly 14.2. Available: https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/2/000454/000454.html
• Geoffrey Rockwell & Stéfan Sinclair. 2016. Hermeneutica. Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. Companion website: http://hermeneuti.ca/.
• Justin A. Stover & Mike Kestermont. 2016. “The Authorship of the Historia Augusta: Two new computational studies.” BICS 59.2, pp. 140-157. Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-5370.2016.12043.
• Michaela Mahlberg & Catherine Smith. 2012. "Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus", Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, 21.1, 51-65. Available: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0963947011432058.
• Marton Ribary & Barbara McGillivray. 2020. "A Corpus Approach to Roman Law Based on Justinian's Digest", Informatics, 7.4. Available: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9709/7/4/44.
• Martin Wynne (ed.). c. 2005. Developing Linguistic Corpora: a Guide to Good Practice, AHDS Guides to Good Practice (Oxford: Oxbow Books). Available: https://icar.cnrs.fr/ecole_thematique/contaci/documents/Baude/wynne.pdf.
• Vaclav Brezina. 2018. Statistics in Corpus Linguistics: A Practical Guide (Cambridge: CUP).

Resources

• Voyant Tools: Getting started
• Diorisis Ancient Greek Corpus
• Oxford Text Archive

Exercise

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