Fundamentals of Text Mining: Curating, Preparing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Textual Data

The relationship between close reading, mid-range reading (Alison Booth, “Mid-Range Reading: Not a Manifesto,” 2017), and distant reading (Franco Moretti, “Distant Reading,” 2013) has expanded the scholarly potential of both literary studies and the social sciences.

The purpose of this workshop is to familiarize attendees with the basic workflow, terms and output a student or new researcher would encounter when undertaking a text mining project. We will give an introduction to text mining, including what it is, what’s possible, and how it is being used for research and instruction. In addition to a discussion on the theories and methodologies in the field, participants will get hands-on practice with the major components of a text mining project using the Gale Digital Scholar Lab.

The Digital Scholar Lab gives users the ability to search across their library’s Gale Primary Sources holdings and select documents to be added to their custom content sets. They can then clean the data, perform text analyses using any of the six tools for text mining in the platform, and export visualizations, tabular data and up to 1000 documents of OCR text.

Computers will be provided to participants for this workshop. However, you will also have the opportunity to bring and work on your own computer.

Instructors: Wendy Kurtz, Gale Digital Scholar Lab; Erin Glass, UC San Diego
Location: Geisel Library, Dunst Classroom
This workshop is open to UC San Diego affiliates only, and registration is required.

For questions, please contact the event coordinator, Erin Glass, via email at erglass@ucsd.edu.