The Non Technical Digital Humanities Researcher
Nineteen year old Jackson studies English because he was always strong in his literature analysis skills in high school. He finds literary style analysis to be really interesting, but also understands that it can be tedious to do by hand. He hears about a professor in the English department who has decided to start a research project analyzing stylistic differences in writing in the 1800s between female and male writers. Some graduate students transcribed and cleaned a large dataset, and now the professor wants him to get involved in some of the statistical analysis, but Jackson has not coded since his AP Computer Science class in high school. He knows that there are some algorithms of interest that his professor wants him to run, but he has no idea how to implement them, and he certainly has never used languages like Python or tools like a command-line interface before. He wants to eventually pick up coding skills, but he wants to ease himself into some of these analyses.
Goal: Jackson wants to use text processing algorithms to analyze particular properties of text because he is interested in the stylistic differences between women and men’s writing in the 1800s. He does not have a strong background in how the algorithms themselves function, so the researchers need a tool that can simultaneously teach them about the algorithms that they are interested in and one that can carry out analysis if they provide data in a clean format.