Blog Post #3

For the "visualization" activity, I chose to create word clouds for Kate Chopin's The Awakening, a book that literally changed my life and enabled me to focus my scholarly interests.  The book was published in 1899; Chopin died five years later in 1904.  She is one of the most important feminist writers in American history and she captured in this novel the struggle with which I, myself, struggled for most of my life, the struggle between conformity and individuality, between the perceived self and the actual self.  Two quotes from the novel sum this up nicely:

• "At a very early period she had apprehended the instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions."

• "She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world." 

I located the text through Project Gutenberg, copied the body of the novel, and pasted it into Wordle.  The word cloud created from this corpus was interesting to me, mostly because it captured the important characters, but not necessarily the important themes (or what I believe to be the important themes):

I then pasted the body of the novel into Voyant.  The initial word cloud was comprised of little more than "and" and "the," so I had to edit it and apply the English Taporware stop.  The resulting word cloud is nearly identical to the Wordle word cloud, with the major difference being that I couldn't figure out how--if it is even possible--to manipulate the font and colors:

The visualizations reveal little to nothing with regard to what I, and scholars like me, consider to be important about this text.  To be sure, the characters are important and Edna is the most important, but the individual thoughts, the internal conflict, the struggle to be an individual in a society that demands conformity for women, are absent.  There are some hints at this conflict as the words "thought" and "think" appear (heaven forbid a woman at the turn of the 20th century should think!).  What I find interesting about the word clouds are the words that, in my opinion, emphasize the constraint that Edna feels, words like "husband," "children," "house," "woman," "Mrs," "Madame," and so on.  Many of these words--and even more in the Voyant word cloud--focus on appearance, which implies conformity and, in Edna's case, constraint.  The one word that stands out to me in the Wordle word cloud and that does not appear at all in the Voyant word cloud is "one."  This, to me, is very telling and suggests (or, at least, implies) Edna's aloneness, her feelings of isolation in a society that demands feminine conformity.  

For my purposes, specifically for the purpose of identifying key terms in texts (I tend to undertake close rhetorical textual analysis with all texts I examine), I find Wordle to be much easier and, for me, more useful in visualizing the important aspects of the corpus.  I also prefer the ability to manipulate the image with regard to its color scheme, font, and layout which for me, as a visual rhetoric scholar, communicates in its own way as much as the text under analysis does.

I have thought a great deal about this with regard to its pedagogical application and have begun to develop what I think will be a spectacular activity for my students in HUC117--Introduction to Computer-Mediated Communication.  When I proposed the course for Pathways, I included a research assignment about some aspect of computer-mediated communication that asks students to investigate a particular issue, research it, identify both scholarly articles and credible online texts/sources, and then to create a webpage that presents the research and their argument about it that includes hyperlinks as a means of citation.  Students often, especially in an introductory-level courses, have difficulty articulating arguments.  For the Spring 2014 semester, I will incorporate this visualization activity as part of the student research assignment.  For the different articles and sites student locate, I will have them copy and paste the corpus into Wordle and/or Voyant and create word clouds,  I will then ask them to include the image of the word cloud(s) on the webpages they create and to discuss the important themes or topics that emerge as the result of the word clouds with respect to the topic each student chooses.  For instance, if a student chooses to investigate the possibilities of artificial intelligence, s/he might find ten sources and create a word cloud using the corpus for all the sources.  The words that emerge might lend themselves to a more in-depth discussion about the important issues concerning artificial intelligence.  At the very least, this sort of visualization might spark interest in students who otherwise might not get excited about the research process.

I'm excited to move forward with this and to apply this strategy not only to my own scholarship, but also as a pedagogical activity to facilitate student research and critical thinking.  I look forward to sharing the results.