Digital/Intellectual
Textual Analysis Project (DITAP)

This short assignment will result in a 3-5 page paper. See the schedule for the due date and means of turning the printed paper in.

In this paper, you will digitally analyze and, intellectually, draw conclusions about a literary text using online tools like those provided by Voyant.

Process of Doing the Digital Analysis

Your process will follow something like this sequence:

1. Choose a literary work--or pair of works to compare, or set of works to analyze together--about which you have some provisional interpretive theory or critical question concerning its structure, narrative, point of view (or any other aspect of "NVFAH")
   
   
2. Be sure you can obtain a digitalized copy of that text, either as a PDF or text file online, or by scanning a printed copy which you do yourself. (If you scan your own, you will also need to make the text machine-readable with software or a service offering OCR.)
   
   
3. Using the tutorial steps that I will provide, upload the digitalized, machine-readable text(s) into Voyant and choose "Reveal" to run Voyant's tools on your text. This produces what is called a "corpus" (a text or set of texts)
   
   
4. Choose to export the corpus to get a dedicated URL for your project. You will thus be able to can come back to your digital analysis later at that URL, and share that URL with others.

Process of Doing the Intellectual Analysis

1. Look carefully through the various visualizations and tables of data that Voyant can produce from your text.
   
   
2. Reflect on how these digital analyses might reveal patterns or characteristics of your text you couldn't or didn't notice before
   
   
3. Think about whether these patterns or characteristics of the text potentially speak to the "provisional interpretive theory or critical question" that prompted you to choose the work or set of works in the first place.
   
   
4. Consider whether the output from your digital tools might be showing you some other pattern or characteristic that might be more suggestive, surprising, or instructive for you to write about
   
   
5. Decide on an observation or pattern to write about which you did not (or could not) have noticed if you had not analyzed the text digitally
   
   
6. Make notes on this observation or pattern: How does it potentially change or add to your reading of the literary text or texts? What are the implications of this new perspective on some aspect of the literary nature or effect of the work (as in NVFAH)?

Writing the Paper

Write a 3-5 page argumentative analysis advancing your interpretation of the work(s), based on your processes above. This paper should do the following (though not necessarily in this order):

• Introduce an interpretative, critical, or historical question or problem about the work(s) to which your analysis will speak. This question or problem will probably have something to do with the techniques or effects of one or more of the work's literary features (as in NVFAH)
  
  
• Describe the tools that you used on the text(s) using Voyant which resulted in your most important and relevant insights or realizations
  
  
• Include at least 3 screen shots of graphics or tables of data from Voyant in your paper and, in your writing, closely analyze and explain that data's meaning and implications in regard to your paper's argument
  
  
• Contextualize your overall insight or realization: How does it help to understand the work's technique or narrative, or something about the ultimate subject of the work, or something about the author, or something about the meaning or social implications or cultural assumptions of the work, etc.

All quotations and cite-able ideas should be documented in MLA-style parenthetical citations and a bibliographic entry on a "Works Cited" page or section at the end.