Exploratory Text Analysis for Philologists

Abstract for workshop given at Universität Rostock

Abstract

Where should historical-language researchers get started with computational analysis of the texts they work on? This is the focus of Patrick Burns’ latest project “Exploratory Philology” and this two-day workshop will guide participants through a series of computer programming exercises designed to help them, building on the work of Nick Montfort and Marina Umaschi Bers among others, learn “how to think with computation” as philologists. Sample “exploratory” exercises including counting animal terms, searching for acrostics, generating random text, and creating cryptogram puzzles.

Two half-day sessions will give participants experience reading, modifying, and writing computer code (in Python and using the Classical Language Toolkit and CLTK Readers) to explore textual data for philological ends—Session 1: What is Exploratory Text Analysis? and Session 2: Exploratory Text Analysis in Practice. The first session will guide participants through six text analysis experiments designed to introduce them to describing, searching, manipulating, and generating texts primarily in Ancient Greek and Latin. The second session will dive deeper into the design of corpus readers and how to use them in their own research projects. Participants are encouraged to bring sample texts from their own projects to learn how to build custom readers.