Project Ideas - Patrick
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Unfortunately, I just have some extremely general ideas about my project.
As I said, my interest lies in text mining software in general.
More specifically, I am interested in the possibilities to make the processes of understanding a text transparent. Since reading large amounts of text is crucial to working in humanities, I would like to explore the digital means one can apply to this core issue.
Nowadays, we have several means of text-structuring at our disposal, such as highlighting, side note or excerptation. All of these means aim at understanding a text. I am wondering if it is possible to make processes of understanding text(s) transparent by applying these means in digital software so that the discussion of text can be “deepened” (made more precise) by sharing individual readings. That means:
- The project would mostly be concerned of visualization of readings and of data produced whilst reading, since we can treat a text as mentioned using Goolge docs.)
- At the same time, I would like to consider the treatment of larger amounts of texts.
Oh, and on a content level i am interested in ways on how biological knowledge ("coming out of a lab") interacts with explanations about how society/culture works. After WWII and before the sociobiology-debate. Possible sources could be images and texts coming from popular science writing.
Update March 22: I defined my project a bit further:
My project should be on ways of creating large databases of text, as well as organizing and analyzing them.
As an example, I will create a larger corpus of text from the archives of “Der Spiegel”. I don’t have specific research questions atm to ask my text corpus, but it should be public perceptions of biological knowledge. My very broad hypotheses that I use for another uni-work as well is that biology has replaced physics as the “queen/king (?) of science” in public perception”.
My workflow will be as following:
- Create a corpus and define my objects: How can I do this? What are practical, technical and legal issues?
- What software can I use to analyze the things that I want?
- What exactly do I have to do to narrow down my extremely wide hypotheses?
- What words should and semantic connections should I look for?
mentioned in issue #26
mentioned in issue #29 (closed)
