Using a number of rudimentary digital humanities computing techniques, I tried to practice what I preach and extract the essence from a set of journal articles. I feel like the process met with some success, but I was not really reading.
The problem
A set of twenty-one (21) essays on the future of academic librarianship was recently brought to my attention:
Leaders Look Toward the Future – This site compiled by Camila A. Alire and G. Edward Evans offers 21 essays on the future of academic librarianship written by individuals who represent a cross-section of the field from the largest institutions to specialized libraries.
Since I was too lazy to print and read all of the articles mentioned above, I used this as an opportunity to test out some of my “services against text” ideas.
The solution
Specifically, I used a few rudimentary digital humanities computing techniques to glean highlights from the corpus. Here’s how:
- First I converted all of the PDF files to plain text files using a program called pdftotext — a part of xpdf. I then concatenated the whole lot together, thus creating my corpus. This process is left up to you — the reader — as an exercise because I don’t have copyright hutzpah.
- Next, I used Wordle to create a word cloud. Not a whole lot of new news here, but look how big the word “information” is compared to the word “collections”.
- Using a program of my own design, I then created a textual version of the word cloud listing the top fifty most frequently used words and the number of times they appeared in the corpus. Again, not a whole lot of new news. The articles are obviously about academic libraries, but notice how the word “electronic” is listed and not the word “book”.
- Things got interesting when I created a list of the most significant two-word phrases (bi-grams). Most of the things are nouns, but I was struck by “will continue” and “libraries will” so I applied a concordance application to these phrases and got lists of snippets. Some of the more interesting ones include: libraries will be “under the gun” financially, libraries will be successful only if they adapt, libraries will continue to be strapped for staffing, libraries will continue to have a role to play, will continue their major role in helping, will continue to be important, will continue to shift toward digital information, will continue to seek new opportunities.
Yes, there may very well be some subtle facts I missed by not reading the full texts, but I think I got a sense of what the articles discussed. It would be interesting to sit a number of people down, have them read the articles, and then have them list out a few salient sentences. To what degree would their result be the same or different from mine?
I was able to write the programs from scratch, do the analysis, and write the post in about two hours, total. It would have taken me that long to read the articles. Just think what a number of librarians could do, and how much time could be saved if this system were expanded to support just about any plain text data.
Tags: digital humanities, reading