LibGuides: Online Teaching and Learning Resource Guide For Faculty: Close Reading and Visual Analysis

Analyze Text

Text analysis is a helpful supplement to close reading. It can provide quantitative confirmation of patterns that readers notice in a corpus of text and help contextualize trends in word usage. A few popular types of text analysis include:

Index terms or phrases within a large body of text
Measure the frequency of words or phrases
Collect instances of a term in context or classify parts of speech

Google Ngram Viewer
The Google Books Ngram Viewer is a tool that allows users to enter terms or phrases to generate a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French"). The corpus contains materials scanned by Google published between 1800 to 2000. The ngrams can be a simple and powerful way for students to consider how words or phrases vary over time.
VoyantTools
VoyantTools is a suite of open-source, web-based text analysis tools. It not only generates word clouds that display terms or phrases that frequently appear in text but also can map usage over time in a corpus and show co-location of certain words in context. Voyant allows for the uploading of .zip files that contain more than one work and generates URLs that make it easy to share or embed the visualizations anywhere online.

Jane Austen's corpus visualized with VoyantTools:

Collaborative Annotation

Annotating research and source materials is a key scholarly activity. Digital annotation offers new opportunities to engage students with text collectively and collaborate on developing ideas about their readings.

Hypothesis
Hypothes.is is a free Chrome extension that enables users to annotate online text collaboratively. Enabling the extension adds a sidebar on the right side of any content on the web wherein users can highlight, take notes, ask questions, and integrate videos and images. The annotations are available to the public by default, although users can create private groups for more security. This tool can be used across all subject areas to develop critical reading skills and engage course readings as a group.

Hypothes.is used by political science students annotating Supreme Court opinions on their professor’s website:

Visual Analysis

Visual analysis can be particularly challenging in a digital environment. The tools below help offer support for engaging with large image files through a variety of techniques including:

Guided tours of works of art
Annotating images with text and embedded media
Telling stories with historic maps, large photographs, or any other image files

Thinglink
ThingLink is a tool for embedding interactive, multimedia content in images, videos, and 360 media. The media-embedding process involves uploading an image or video and linking it to other resources on the web. Links can lead users to informational web pages, audio recordings, and videos. Thinglink guides users most of the way with simple prompts, and a search content option helps support the embedding process with links to commonly used web resources.
StorymapJS
StoryMapJS is an open-source, web-based tool created by Knightlabs at Northwestern University to give visual tours of images and tell stories linked to specific places on a map. Users create Storymaps in a browser by stringing together a series of slides where they can also add text, images, and video to their discussion. The result resembles a slideshow that walks through particular aspects of a work of art, a photograph, or any other large image.

Storymap Example:

Questions?

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