Literary Text Analysis with Spyral Notebooks, a Notebook Environment Companion to Voyant Tools

Workshop ID:

WT-19

Workshop Title:

Literary Text Analysis with Spyral Notebooks, a Notebook Environment Companion to Voyant Tools

Organizers:

Geoffrey Rockwell, Kaylin Land

Time (in JST and UTC):

July 26 7:30-11:00 (JST)

July 25 22:30-July 26 2:00 (UTC)

Maximum number of participants:

20

Description:

Join us for “Literary Text Analysis with Spyral Notebooks.” This workshop will introduce you to Spyral Notebooks, a brand-new notebook environment that extends Voyant Tools. Spyral Notebooks allows you to document your results from Voyant as well as perform more complicated textual analysis. The notebooks are designed to facilitate literate programming: you have space to write in prose as well as coding blocks and dynamic Voyant panels. By the end of the workshop, you will have a solid foundation for expanding upon existing coding samples, teaching with Spyral and writing your own notebooks from scratch. We look forward to sharing Spyral with you!

Aim of the workshop/tutorial:

We will cover everything from setting up a new Spyral Notebook to performing textual analysis on a corpus of your choosing. We will begin with the nuts and bolts of using Spyral including creating, saving, and editing notebooks. You will learn how to load your Voyant corpus into Spyral or how to upload files for handling in Spyral. Then we will move onto simple coding examples for working with Spyral. We will encourage you to adapt existing coding samples on your own corpus to see what kinds of analysis you might find. By the end of the workshop, you will have a solid foundation for expanding upon existing coding samples, teaching with Spyral and writing your own notebooks from scratch.

Outline:

  • Introduction to Spyral Notebooks: What Spyral notebooks are

  • How Spyral notebooks can be used

  • Spyral’s integration with Voyant Tools

  • Introduction to literate coding paradigm and design choices for Spyral

  • Spyral Basics: Opening a Spyral Notebook from Voyant Tools

  • Adding cells, deleting cells, reordering cells

  • Saving Spyral notebooks

  • Running code cells and understanding code output

  • Literary Text Analysis with Spyral: Viewing a summary of a corpus with the Summary Tool

  • Exploring corpus term frequencies with Cirrus and Corpus Terms

  • Exploring corpus term distributions with Trends, Terms Radio, and Document Terms

  • Exploring corpus collocates with Terms Berry, Collocates Graph, Contexts and Word Tree

  • Exploring a text with Reader tool

  • Teaching with Spyral

  • Advanced Spyral: Loading different file types into Spyral including .txt, .xlsx, .csv, .html and .xml

  • Loading .xml files and specifying x-paths to instruct Spyral which parts of file to use as text for analysis

  • Using Spyral categories for sentiment analysis