Research Methods in Digital Humanities is a diverse class of various majors. Some of the students are humanities majors but others are not.

This class is here to introduce digital humanities and its research methods. When something is being introduced, it will not go straight into the most technical aspects but an overview with the basics being shown. When textual analysis is started, the basics will first be introduced. By doing so students will not have to suffer learning Python right away but instead they will slowly learn some Python through use and practice. The class is not a Python class but a digital humanities class. The first use of textual analysis will be on a comparison of texts from Project Gutenberg. The reason Project Gutenberg is used is because it allows the students to pick there topic and teaches them about data reuse. A key part of digital humanities is using and analyzing digital data across various transmedia, another part is the use of open source materials. By using Project Gutenberg, the students learn how to use one form of digital media, as well as how to reuse e-books that no longer are copyrighted. As mentioned before, when introducing someone to a subject, normally a more simple version is introduced and later the harder parts are added. This is accomplished by Dr. Hemphill by giving students the Python functions, so it might seem like the coding requirement is skipped, but code is still needed for the program to run. So the students will learn how to run the code with basic Python commands. This allows the student to focus on understanding textual analysis.

Part of digital humanities research, is to use quantitative data to support the claims made about a topic. This can be accomplished by using textual analysis to pick out keywords, amounts of sentences per paragraph, amounts of white space, or to find word frequencies. Dr. Hunt used textual analysis to find the word frequency of verbs that pertained to feet in Harry Potter. She showed that the male characters had eight out of ten be action verbs while the females only had three. Dr. Hunt goes on to use this information to further her point of females being gender stereotyped in Harry Potter. But textual analysis can also be used to formulate questions. By comparing two sets of texts, students can either try to use it to prove a point they believe, or ask themselves questions to try to further their understanding of the text, they can also try to use textual analysis to answer those questions. This is similar to how Mr. Laudun teaches textual analysis; he teaches the students to ask questions about their quantitative data, because “numbers can’t draw conclusions.” Comparing two texts also allows the students to practice. Often times code can’t include all; their might be a slight change between the two texts which causes the code to get a run-time error. Now students have to practice solving their problem. With multiple repetitions the students are more likely to remember how to use the programs, it will also allow the students to get more confident with the code as they reuse it.

Hemphill, Libby. 2014. “Introducing Text Analytics to Undergraduates.” Libby Hemphill. October 16. http://libbyh.com/2014/10/16/introducing-text-analytics-to-undergraduates/.

Laudun, John. “Text Analytics 101.” John Laudun. N.p., 23 Feb. 2013. Web. 19 Sept. 2016.

Hunt, Sally. 2015. “Representations of Gender and Agency in the Harry Potter Series.” In Corpora and Discourse Studies, edited by Paul Baker and Tony McEnery, 266–84. Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics. Palgrave Macmillan UK. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137431738_13.