Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
Viewers also liked
Viewers also liked (20)
Similar to Laurel Stvan dh ant_conc 2/27/13
Similar to Laurel Stvan dh ant_conc 2/27/13 (20)
More from Jessica C. Murphy
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Laurel Stvan dh ant_conc 2/27/13
- 1. Digital Tools in Pedagogy: AntConc for Humanities Students DFW-area Digital Humanities Colloquium UT Dallas February 27th, 2013 Laurel Smith Stvan Department of Linguistics and TESOL UT Arlington stvan@uta.edu @Ling_Lass
- 2. Approaches • Digital aspects • Humanities aspects • Pedagogy aspects 2
- 3. Digital aspects From paper to electronic texts Digitize -- via scanning and OCR -- via downloading -- via typing + coding or tagging 3
- 4. Humanities aspects • Tools for analysis Concordancing software -- quicker gathering and skimming -- frequency, collocations • What are the text’s characteristics? • What are the text’s themes? Find support in the text for your claims! 4
- 5. AntConc Free concordancing software Cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) Works with txt or XML files 5
- 6. AntConc Free concordancing software Cross-platform Works with txt or XML files Laurence Anthony’s Concordance program 6
- 7. AntConc: frequency of words 7
- 8. AntConc: context of words 8
- 9. AntConc: by part of speech 9
- 10. Pedagogy aspects Assignments: • Compile your own set of texts (LSP corpus) • OCR training • Try out POS tagging (see what annotation buys you) • Search for particular words: the, you, but or now, health, whisper • Commentary and reflection 1 0
- 11. Pedagogy aspects Assignments: Compile your own set of texts •Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/ •Oxford Text Archive http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/ •The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts https://perswww.kuleuven.be/~u0044428/ clmetev.htm 11
- 12. Pedagogy aspects: real data 1 2
- 13. Pedagogy: messy data 1 3
- 14. Reflection Using tools, but also using the tools to answer research questions… Frequency info or knowing what words collocate with others is not a conclusion, but those can be a good steps along the way to understanding the language use you can find in large sets of texts. 1 4
- 15. References to share Anthony, Laurence. (2012). AntConc (3.2.4). Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/antconc_index.html Bowker, Lynne. (2002). "Capturing Data in Electronic Form." Computer- Aided Translation Technology. Ottawa: Univ. of Ottawa Press. Bowker, Lynne and Jennifer Pearson. (2002).Working with Specialized Language: A Practical Guide toUsing Corpora. London/New York: Routledge. ReadIRIS OCR. https://www.irislink.com/ DH Subject and Course Guide at UTA: http://libguides.uta.edu/digitalhumanities 15
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon, and thanks for inviting me to talk about AntConc as a DH tool.
- Three issues are relevant, and are intertwined…. Digital aspects, Humanities aspects, and pedagogy aspects.As I said, I’m talking today about AntConc, which I’ve used several times in a class for linguistics students, but which is very applicable to text analysts from lots of humanities disciplines.
- One main way that this is digital, is that the students learn to move materials from paper into digital form to manipulate.When we digitize, it can take the form of inputting via scanning and then running OCR; it can involve capturing online material; or in some cases retyping older texts. In all these cases we also start to hint at ways that tagging material, or coding to capture metadata can also be of use.
- As for how this is considered to be humanities, with AntConc students still do many of the traditional tasks of analysis, but now on larger sets of data…
- Have used many: Conc, old hypercard stack driven for Mac. Then WordSmith tools, feature rich software that runs only on Windows machines. Have settled on AntConc.It’s appealing for several reasons… free, cross-platform, so students can download it at home as well as in the lab at school.It works with txt or xml.
- Here’s the origin of its odd name… Let me do a little demo of the features students can try that are relevant as a tool for humanities projects…
- One cool aspect of using lots of texts is to see which words are used the most frequently.Little functions words at the top….Juicier words are further down the list.You can see in the sidebar that I am using a bunch of 19th century essays.
- Once you’ve chosen one of the juicier words from your text, or from the set of texts in your genre, you can home in on all its uses and examine them in together in their contexts. Here I’m looking at whispered. But that may lead you to look at how a certain part of speech is used. Say I wanted to find all the past tense verbs. Or, all the past participles.
- If I had text files tagged for parts of speech, I could look for all the verbs marked as past participle and pull them all up together. This list is from a different set of texts that seems to involve a lot of speaking….Now that you can see how easily students can find patterns in large sets of texts, let’s think about the pedagogical aspects.
- 4) For linguists it’s useful to compare the distribution of function words like articles, pronouns, and conjunctions with content words like adverbs, nouns and verbs. But most likely you’ll already have a word in mind for your own reasons that you want to the check for to find a bunch of examples and their patterns.5) Lastly, it’s important that the task not just be how to run the software, but also emphasize discussing the results and their ramifications.
- As far as compiling your own texts to look at. A couple sources of existing public domain texts are useful—Project Gutenberg and the Oxford Text archive. Hendrik De Smet at the university of Leuven had gathered together texts from these first two sources into a very neat corpus of late modern English text that you can obtain for free. In the case of more modern texts, my students often work on compiling the texts of understudied languages that they are exploring, or, work with more modern sources like Tweets and texts. This last source offers some available Twitter corpora.
- Lots of times students have a particular language or a particular era they are interested in studying. To get material, they may need to scan in paper pages. This is a Scottish-English dictionary that I chose for an exercise for my students. As a lesson in OCR issues, It has text that curves into the gutter, and small letters in the pronunciation that make it trickier than it first appears to use OCR on.
- For a real challenge in how OCR works, here’s a bit of realia to work with. These receipts have a variety of fonts including dot matrix printing, bleed through from the back of the paper, and wrinkly pages.
- Lastly, a note on how the using the tool is not the totality of the research. I want them to use to use tools like AntConc, but besides knowing how to use the tools, I want them to be able to use it to answer research questions. Frequency information, or knowing what words in a text collocate with others in not itself a conclusion. But those can be good steps along the way to understanding the language use one can find in large collections of texts.
- As references I have not so much works cited, as useful sources I wanted to share today. The first three are sources I’m using in my corpus class this semester. For the fourth, there are many OCR programs out there. But the interactive “learn” feature in ReadIris programs are pretty fun and instructive.The last is a plug for the DH site maintained by our subject librarian at UTA, Rafia Mirza.Thank you!