Getting Started with Textual Analysis

Dr. Christopher M. Church

University of Nevada, Reno
[email protected]
www.christophermchurch.com

What will we be learning?

- Textual analysis (aka text mining): the process of distant reading

What are Voyant Tools?

- Free online textual analysis suite put out by hermaneuti.ca (Stéfan Sinclair &
Geoffrey Rockwell)
- Fairly easy to use and straightforward (requires no programming knowledge)
- Good for getting started and doing light analysis, but sacrifices fine-grained control

What is our data set?

- A month of transcripts from Sunday talk shows from three different networks
(Fox News, CNN, and NBC).
o FNS = Fox News Sunday on the Fox News Channel
o SOTU = State of the Union on CNN
o MTP = Meet the Press on NBC
- Enrichment: Books available from Project Gutenberg

Where to go for help?

- Tools from Voyant with documentation: http://docs.voyant-tools.org/tools/
- TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research): http://www.tapor.ca/

Where to get this packet?

- http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/docs/

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Uploading our corpus
1. Download the Sunday Shows transcript corpus for March 2014 from
(http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/data.zip)
You should save it to your Desktop for easy access.

2. Now navigate your browser to www.voyant-tools.org and click “Upload.” Add each of the text files
one at a time in the dialog. Make sure to add all the documents with prefixes FNS, SOTU, and MTP.

NOTE: To save time, you can grab the files from my server by putting the following URLS in the “Add Texts”
section (one per line). Copy and paste. (if the PDF gives you trouble, copy the links from here:
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/docs/plain-text-list-of-links.txt

http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/FNS_2014-02-02.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/FNS_2014-02-09.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/FNS_2014-02-16.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/FNS_2014-02-23.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/FNS_2014-03-02.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/MTP_2014-02-02.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/MTP_2014-02-09.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/MTP_2014-02-16.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/MTP_2014-02-23.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/MTP_2014-03-02.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/SOTU_2014-02-02.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/SOTU_2014-02-09.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/SOTU_2014-02-16.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/SOTU_2014-02-23.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/individual/SOTU_2014-03-02.txt

3. Once you have added all the files (15 in all), click to continue to the analysis screen. Take
some time getting acquainted with the tools screen. Click around and see what happens. You can
read more about the analysis screen’s layout here: http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur/users

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Doing Some Analysis

1. OK, at this point, all you really know is that the news
anchors and their guests use a lot of prepositions,
articles, conjunctions, and other stop words that tell
us very little about their topics of conversation.

2. Let’s filter out the stop words to get a better picture

of what’s going on:

a. Click on the gear

b. Now we need to filter out the stop words. To do so,

choose “English (Taporware)” and then check “Apply
Stop Words Globally” and click “Ok.”

c. We should now have a better image of what is in the

corpus. Take a look.

d. We can also customize our stop word list if we want to get rid of other common words that we’re not
interested in (e.g. common verbs, pronouns). We do this by clicking “Edit Stop Words.” I’ve created a
more expansive list. (http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/stopwords.txt).

e. Please select all, copy and paste (CTRL-A, CTRL-C, CTRL-P) replace the current stop word list with the
custom one I’ve created. What has changed?

3. Now that we have the stop words settled, we can see what was
covered by each show on each date. Let’s check out the
Summary Statistics.

a. Take a look at the information available.

b. A few things to note:

i. Distinctive Words give a good sense of what was
being discussed on each show. You can check
this against the show’s title (for FNS and SOTU)
by looking at the transcript contents available at
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/transcript-contents.txt

c. Take some time looking at the other Summary Statistics. Try clicking on things and see what happens
(note: most things can be clicked on, and the analysis tool will react by showing you more context).

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Aggregate Analysis

1. OK, now what if we wanted to compare the different Sunday Shows against one another for the entire month of
February? Well, to do so, we’d need to do some pre-processing on the data. In fact, the individual transcripts
were already pre-processed in order to remove the speaker tags from the text.

i. n.b. All data analysis requires manipulation of the data prior to analysis, and this varies from a
small amount to a great deal, and is always based on the scholar’s knowledge of the data set.
When doing data analysis, always try to make this transparent (you can see my pre-processing
code at https://github.com/cmchurch/NLP-SUNDAY-NEWS_tutorial).

2. So, now we need to start a new Voyant Tools display for our aggregate analysis. Leaving the previous one open,
create a new tab, go to voyant-tools.org, and enter the following three URLS:

http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/aggregate/FNS_all.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/aggregate/MTP_all.txt
http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/aggregate/SOTU_all.txt

NOTE: As mentioned earlier, you can also download the data and use the Upload Dialog
(http://www.christophermchurch.com/uploads/voyant-workshop/aggregate/data.zip).

3. As before, make sure you filter out the stop words to get a
meaningful picture of the corpus’ contents.

4. Let’s take a look at some aggregate comparisons, starting with

discussions of “taxes.”

a. Let’s first search for all words in the corpus that have
“tax” in it.

Check all the boxes next to words with tax in them.

b. This will plot all the words on our Word Trends widget.

c. To combine the terms to get a sense of the overall

discussion of taxes, click the collapse terms check box.

d. Try this out with some of your own terms to

compare the three Sunday Shows (you can use the
Cirrus or Summary widgets to think up some terms, or
you can use the following suggestions):
i. democrat(s), republican(s)
ii. job(s)

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Aggregate Analysis (2)

5. To compare different terms, we’ll need to use the Favorites list.

a. Let’s compare the use of “obamacare” with the use of

the word “health care” across the three shows.

b. To do so, search for “obamacare,” check the box, and

then click “Add to favorites.” (heart plus).

c. Do the same for “healthcare” and then bring up the Favorites list by clicking on the heart.
n.b. ignore the error that pops up (it’s from the space character in “health care”

d. Now we can check both “obamacare” and “heath care” and see them on the Word Trends widget. Make
sure to uncheck the “collapse terms” button to make the comparison.

6. Now, we need to be careful about how we draw conclusions regarding comparisons between the three shows.
Many words have a wide variety of meanings (e.g. right vs left) that can complicate what we think we know.

To get a sense of how the word is being used, you use the
Keywords in Context widget.

a. Try it now with the word “right.”

i. How is the word “right” being used?

What about “left”?

b. Now, go back and look at your earlier search terms

from step 4 in context. Were they being used how you
envisioned?

7. Now, let’s save the link to our data. We can use the Export Option to save our work, or to use the same data
with different tools. Access the Export by clicking the diskette icon in the upper left corner.

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Other Tools to Try and Enrichment Activities

Collocation and Correspondence

ScatterPlot (Correspondence Analysis)

Excellent Descriptions of Multivariate Correspondence Analysis:

by Lisa Goddard: http://www.tapor.ca/?id=20

by Stefan Sinclair: http://stefansinclair.name/correspondence-analysis/

Collocation Networks

Full list of additional tools from Voyant with documentation: http://docs.voyant-tools.org/tools/

Old Bailey API (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/obapi/)

Extra Documents to Check Out

Comparing Corpora in Voyant Tools:
http://www.briancroxall.net/2012/07/18/comparing-corpora-in-voyant-tools/

Voyant Tools used to Analyze Runaway Slave Ads in Mississippi and Arkansas:
http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu/files/2014/02/voyant-presentation.pdf

Data Visualization Handout:

http://lib.ua.edu/sites/default/files/digitalhumanities/Abbott%20Data%20Visualization%20Workshop%20Hand
out.pdf

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Humanists’ Listserv Data Set (note: very large and slow)

If you want to take a look at a fairly large data set, you can
explore the Humanists’ Listserv data, which contains all
listserv emails among humanists (think H-Net) from 1987
to 2008. You can do so by clicking “Open” on the main
voyant-tools screen. This can give you a change-over-time
view of what sorts of things scholars were discussing over the past two decades. Below are two examples of the changes
you can see in the data. You can replicate these results, or discover your own.

The Triumph of Google

The decline and resurgence of Foucault

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