Can an inferred meaning be discovered?
Books contain so many words. With all of them, it’s pretty evident that they tell a story and convey a certain message. I chose to work with the book, The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DuBois. However, I was interested in seeing if I could determine what the general meaning/summary of the book was without having read it. So, can only a little bit of details can help us infer the potential point of the book?
“Chapters” of the approach
Sources
I decided to use a raw text file on the book The Souls of Black Folks-which can be found in Project Gutenberg. Since it was a text file, the data cleaning mainly had to do with removing any words/sections that weren’t necessary to the text I wanted to use. I utilized Dev Tools and Voyant to do so.
Processes
To analyze this text and see how well my proposal would go, I decided to use Voyant tools. I made the forethought, afterthought, and chapters into their own text files and uploaded them to a folder within my site. From there, I was able to upload them into Voyant. I was provided with a cirrus and trends for each section of the book.
Significance
Something unique from this project is that there were a lot of similar words within the corpus for each chapter. That helps when it comes to determining what the foundation of the story is. With the flexibility I had, I could tailor cleaning the data and visualizing it to my own preferences. This really highlights the creativity within the Digital Arts & Humanities field. The artist has the freedom to develop a project, but it’s important that the data is reliable and used in an efficient manner. However, this approach can undermine and ignore certain words that play a part in the story. Each word is written for a reason and by simply analyzing the most common word(s), I could be leaving out information that is crucial to the message. A message that this could convey is that every piece of history, information, or data is needed to craft a good Digital Arts & Humanities project.
How did this initiative turn out?
Personal Thoughts
After my expeditions with this project, my educated inference that the book is centered around what it means to be a black person in the United States, especially the South. I believe it goes through the different components of life that black people go through and how their race plays a major role; this spans from education to faith to the workforce. It probably discusses how black people navigate the world while being discriminated against, devalued, and dehumanized. Hence the word “soul” in the title, what they experience is stored within them-thoughts and emotions are suppressed at the expense of black people being oppressed.
My Presentation Preference
I wanted to find the simplest, yet aesthetically pleasing way to present my findings. For the key aspects of this project, I desired to add images of my process so that people can follow along with how it developed. I also placed multiple images of my data output from Voyant so people could make their own inferences. The word map/corpus was the main way I aspired to present my information visually and with descriptions, people can stay engaged while simultaneously be informed.
There were so many lessons learned throughout this journey! I hope you loved it as much as I did!