In Unit 2 we’ve been working in R to measure simple features like word counts and sentiment. Accordingly, Project 2 will use these methods to ask a question about a text or a series of texts, finding new insights to which we otherwise wouldn’t have access.
For this second project, please review President Obama’s state of the union address to study and use Voyant to answer some non-obvious question about it. Prepare a report with the six sections outlined in the guide to writing project reports. The report should be over two pages long—more if you include any charts—when written in a 12-point font with double-spaced lines and 1-inch margins. This should put you over 800 words, divided unevenly among the sections. Upload the file as a Microsoft Word file. The report will be graded based on the project grading rubric.
The question you choose to study might vary greatly in scope and specificity. In the same way you’ve chosen your own text or set of texts, you should also choose your own question to answer something that drives your interest. The options are broad, with two caveats:
- Ask a question you haven’t asked before, about a text / set of texts you haven’t studied before.
- Ask a question about a text that wasn’t directly worked through during one of the explanations offered by the instructor.
Here are some sample questions to give you some ideas, with parenthetical additions suggesting the kind of thing that would bear further consideration in the Discussion section of the report:
- In what meaningful ways do the most frequent words in the lyrics of one university’s alma mater (or a few universities’ alma maters) differ from those found at other universities? In what ways are they similar? (And what do these differences / similarities suggest to us about the university or universities in question?)
- We study poets like Emily Dickinson and William Blake because we admire both their language and their insights when commenting on the world around them. What can an analysis of simple features and sentiment reveal of their work? For this kind of analysis you might choose to focus on just one of the following:
- Compare the words used in each section of the poems of one of these poets. What are the differences or similarities among the most frequent words used in each section of the collection? (And what kinds of insights does this afford us of the topics explored in each section?)
- Consider the sentiments of one of these poetry collections. Which words are most strongly associated with positive and negative sentiments, and is one of these notably stronger than the other? (And what do these kinds of words reveal about the poet’s interests or subject matter?)
- Compare the most frequent words or the sentiments from both poets. What are the differences or similarities that you can find between Blake and Dickinson? (And how does this kind of analysis-from-a-distance amplify or limit the possible insights one might draw from the texts, when compared to traditional close reading?)
- NASA’s Apollo 13 mission to the moon in 1970 was a scary incident, with an explosion in an oxygen tank threatening the lives of crew members and potentially stranding them in space. Luckily for us, there’s a transcript of the crew’s radio transmissions as they worked to fix things. What can an analysis of simple features and sentiment reveal to us about this transcript? For this kind of analysis, you might choose to focus on just one of the following:
- Do the most common words transmitted in the first part of their flight (e.g., the first 40 hours) compare to those most frequent words transmitted in the time following their in-flight accident (e.g., for another 40-hour span)? (And what might this comparison reveal of their changing mindset and focus?)
- Can we see a shift in sentiment change over time, and do spikes in emotion relate to critical moments of their mission? (And what understandings can we glean from those moments where spikes don’t seem synchronized with critical moments?)
- Which words are most associated with a sentiment like fear, and do these words differ among the crew in the space craft and the crew on the ground? (And how can this consideration help us to understand the differences in the stakes faced by each group?)
- Which words are most strongly correlated with positive or negative sentiments in a religious text like the Bible or the Qur’an? (And what are the limitations of such an analysis?)