This week we discussed a variety of “distant” reading tools that may (or may not) be useful when you begin doing your research and writing your paper. Here’s a quick run-down of the tools we discussed, with links for your reference:

• Wordle: Allows you to paste in a bunch of plain text and get a quick visualization of word frequency. You can toggle common “stop words” on and off and change the layout of the word cloud, but you don’t have much control over eliminating words from the cloud, or integrating word counts into the visualization itself.
• Tagcrowd: Similar to Wordle, but with more fine-grained control over whether to show word counts, how to group words together, and what words to include, and less control over the aesthetics of the word cloud.
• Voyant: The most feature rich application we saw in class, this allows you to enter multiple texts into the software and then perform detailed analyses of word frequencies, word locations, trends across and within texts, and more. You can also look at words in context to refine your analysis. A manual with tutorials is available here.

All of these tools require that you have a “plain text” document, but many of the sites listed on our Resources page have primary sources in plain text. For example, nineteenth-century Google Books can be viewed as page images or as plain text, and many books available on the Internet Archive (including parts of the Boston Public Library Anti-Slavery Collection) can also be viewed as plain text by clicking on the “Full Text” link in the “View the Book” pane on the left. Be aware that in both of these cases, the plain text you are getting is generated with scanning software, so it may not be completely accurate, but it may allow you to do some “distant” reading of your sources in conjunction with close readings.

Finally, if you couldn’t get enough of that abolitionist music we listened to on Tuesday, there’s lots more where that came from on Vimeo.

“My Country ‘Tis of Thee” from ASU English on Vimeo.

You can also find an example of an abolitionist hymnal or songbook on Google Books, but note how looking at this particular book in “plain text” doesn’t give you everything in plain text.