DWRL Lesson Plans - Textual analysis

Students bring to class segments of fiction or creative nonfiction (100-300 words) they have prepared, introducing a “great American” (very broadly defined). They then form into groups, and each group choses one story to revise and quote, focusing on the way its various elements (organization, vocabulary, selection of events) work together to cast a vision both for the character discussed, and for America as a whole. The class contributes to two larger discussions: that about the nature of literary evidence, and that about the constructedness of national narratives.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

Prepare a brief lecture introducing the nature of literary evidence (words and phrases that are tied to larger patterns present throughout the text) and describing the “quotation sandwich” (summarize a quotation, quote it, and then analyze it.) This can be done the class before (especially if you have 50-minute classes) or at the beginning of class (in the case of 75-minute classes.)

Instructions For Students:

[Note: as in all group activities, I find it particularly useful to insist that each student records or presents one aspect of the work. Therefore, the student who wrote the story should not mark the story, a different group member should type the analysis, and a fourth student (assuming groups of four) should read the analysis to the class.]

1) Each student should have already composed the first 100-300 words for a fictional narrative about a historical figure he or she feels represents distinctively American virtues, and posted this to the class discussion site. If you are not using a tech-enabled classroom, these narratives should be printed as well.

2) In class, students will be assigned into groups. Each group should choose one member’s paper for analysis (not necessarily the “best” story, but certainly the one they feel most comfortable analyzing.)

3) Have students mark the compositions, focusing on key words and phrases that might hint at the ways their characters represent larger “American” virtues.

4) Have students compose *and post online* (or write, if using a non-digital classroom) a short analysis of the chosen narrative, focusing in particular on the way that tensions or conflicts within the text recreate a particular vision of what it means to be American.

5) Have students read the paragraph they have written out loud to the class.

6) If possible, gently guide class discussion towards appreciation for both the diversity of ways texts reflect larger attitudes, and for the ways this process is mappable at even the smallest levels of the text.

7) Remind students that the close readings will remain online as an example to consult when creating their Close Reading Assignments.

Evaluation Suggestions:

Because this is not a creative writing course, I found it essential not to grade students’ actual compositions. Instead, the compositions received full credit as long as effort was made. The group analysis of the compositions could be graded, though I chose instead to give credit on a credit/no-credit basis.

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

The exercise was met with a certain degree of awkwardness, but by and large students enjoyed the change of pace and profited from the discussion. I found it particularly important to spend time chatting with each group individually, so as to provide further guidance as to what constitutes “literary evidence” and how it can be quoted.

Course Type:

Literary Studies Course

Course Description:

This exercise was used in a lower-division, writing-flag literature course focused on national narratives. Students ranged from first-years to seniors, and came from a number of majors across campus.

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Using Juxta to Compare Editions

nhgray — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 19:47:08 +0000

Author:

Nicole Gray

Image Credit:

Image by Seth Sawyers on sidewalk flying (http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidewalk_flying/5124506505/).

Brief Assignment Overview:

This lesson plan prompts students to use Juxta (collation software) to compare different witnesses or instances of a text. Students compare multiple versions of a literary work, locating revisions in order to discuss word choice and textual instabilities. Most useful for literary works with full-text editions available online.

Type of Assignment:

In-class Exercise

Assignment Length:

Single Class Period

Pedagogical Goals - Literature:

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Collaboration

Creative Commons

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

This assignment is intended to get students thinking about revision, or how changes to literary texts get incorporated into different editions over time.

Media Requirements:

Technology-Based Classroom (computers for each student)

Required Materials:

Technology based classroom

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Late in the Semester

Full Assignment Description:

Juxta is open source collation software developed by NINES (based at UVA) that allows the user to compare multiple versions of a text. There are several visualization options that can assist in the process, including a parallel display, which sets two or more witnesses next to each other and tracks the changes between them, and a histogram of edits over the course of the entire document.

Edits made to literary texts by authors can be interesting in a number of different contexts, demonstrating evolution of the text and the author’s (and publisher’s) ideas and constructions over time. It’s particularly interesting for the Banned Books course to think about whether some such edits might be responses to conditions of censorship and protest that affect particular works. But this is also an exercise that encourages close reading, particularly when applied to a piece of poetry that goes through multiple revisions, because changes at single-word and punctuation level can prompt discussions of the meaning of, for instance, dashes versus ellipses, the role of publishers and printers in the revision process, and so forth.

In preparation for a close reading assignment on Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” I considered having students use Juxta to compare two sections of the poem from different editions. Whitman published several editions of Leaves of Grass over the course of the nineteenth century, and the poem changed drastically from the first (1855) to the final (1891-2) edition.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

It might be useful, if doing this in class, to select a passage in advance that has substantive or interesting revisions likely to prompt good discussion.

A bit of experimentation with Juxta also is in order. Juxta Commons I think is in testing phase, and should be rolled out soon – this version would be easier, because it doesn’t require download. Students will need to create accounts and copy and paste the text of the documents they are comparing into the "Sources" box. These documents can then be made into "Witnesses," and then compared as a "Comparison Set." The Comparison Set can be shared or not, as the user desires.

Until Juxta Commons is available, students can download Juxta as a standalone desktop application at www.juxtasoftware.org, so if this is the route you take, it might be worth making sure the software can be downloaded on local machines.

Instructions For Students:

Go to www.juxtasoftware.org.
Select “Download” on the left, and select the appropriate operating system.
Find two versions of your assigned text online to compare, and copy and paste or type them into two separate plain text documents (NOTE: don’t use Word for this – any plain text editor like NoteTab will do.)
Save each version in a separate document with a unique name (for instance, Song_of_Myself_1855_Section_7).
In Juxta, select “Add Document” (the +) from the shortcut menu, and add both documents to the list.
Select one of the documents, and then in the screen at the right, select “Comparison View.” This should show you both documents side by side, with the differences highlighted. You can see the highlights in each document individually in “Collation View.”
You can see a visualization of the changes in the document over time in the “Histogram.”
Write down a few sentences describing what you have found. What kinds of changes can you identify between these two editions? Select one or two changes that seem most significant to you. What is the effect of these changes on the poem?
Be prepared to discuss your answers.

Evaluation Suggestions:

Instructors can assess this activity in a few ways: by calling on individual students to provide and explain their responses, by having students incorporate comparisons into their papers, or by making this a more formal written assignment that can be collected.

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

I didn’t try this with Juxta yet, but I did have my students do a collation by hand across three versions – manuscript, periodical, and Leaves of Grass – of Whitman’s “The Dalliance of the Eagles,” one of the poems challenged by officials in the late nineteenth century. It worked surprisingly well. They were excited to find differences, and interested to talk about what they might mean. In the case of “Dalliance,” the manuscript version is very different from the Leaves of Grass version, while the periodical version only has a few small changes, so it was useful to consider the importance of word and punctuation choice and the different scales of revision. It seems like Juxta-based comparisons of different versions of “Song of Myself” or any other text with multiple variants could open up a way to talk about revision, textual instability, punctuation-level edits, and outside influences (printer, publisher, censor, &c), and Juxta’s clear indication of differences and multiple-panel displays would have been handy to put up on the screen.

Course Type:

Literary Studies Course

Course Description:

This section of Banned Books introduces students to literary analysis and takes a look at books that have been challenged, edited, or banned over the past two centuries in the U.S.

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Essay Revision with Automated Textual Analysis

Michael Widner — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:47:21 +0000

Author:

Michael Widner

Image Credit:

Screenshot of Voyeur interface by Michael Widner

Brief Assignment Overview:

This assignment uses Voyeur to analyze word frequencies and word distribution in student writing to help students see the paper’s thesis and how the argument progresses without reading the paper.

Type of Assignment:

In-class Exercise

Assignment Length:

Single Class Period

Pedagogical Goals - Rhetoric:

Arrangement

Rhetorical Analysis

Style

Pedagogical Goals - Literature:

Textual Analysis

Word Choice

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Open Access Software

Remediation

Visualization

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

Gain an objective, computer-assisted understanding of one's writing. Learn how to use Voyeur for textual analysis.

Media Requirements:

Technology-Based Classroom (computers for each student)

Required Materials:

Computer, Voyeur software, student writing

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Useful Anytime

Full Assignment Description:

I like to discover and play with digital humanities tools. One I recently discovered is Voyeur, which creates word clouds and word frequency graphs for texts you provide it. Despite the warning by Jacob Harris that we should be wary of word clouds, they can serve as a gentle introduction to automated text analysis for students. While experimenting with Voyeur, I wondered how I could best use this tool to expose my students to the ways the digital humanities are transforming how we interact with and study literature. Rather than explore a literary text, however, I decided that it might be interesting to see if textual analysis can help with the process of revision. My hope is that this exercise might make students see the value of such tools in a different way and see their own writing as texts available to (and requiring) interrogation.

Voyeur is an easy tool to use. You simply upload or paste a text and click “Reveal”. You’re then provided with a workbench-like screen that starts with a word cloud and copy of the text you submitted. You can also upload multiple documents in many common file formats such as Microsoft Word or PDF. Doing so allows Voyeur to create a corpus of texts that it can then compare for word frequencies. Voyeur also provides two pre-defined corpora: one of Shakespeare’s plays (which would be fun for a course on his works) and another of a humanist listserv archive. The initial word cloud includes every word in the document, which is often not very useful because of common words like “the,” but the tool provides a pre-programmed list of “stop words” that will cause Voyeur to redraw the word cloud with those words omitted. Clicking on any word in the cloud will provide a graph of the relative frequency of that word. The tool also provides information about vocabulary density, distinctive words, length of documents, and a number of other statistical details worth investigating.

Rather than delve into the possibilities some of the more advanced statistical measures provided, I decided to focus on word clouds and word frequencies when I use this tool with students; those two elements seem the most accessible to students who probably lack experience with automated textual analysis. I also want to focus on seeing if this approach can help address one of the biggest and most prevalent problems I encounter in student writing: the difficulty stating a clear thesis and then staying focused on that thesis throughout the paper. I wondered, then, if a word cloud and graphs of word frequencies might allow a way to visualize the actual (rather than implicit or imagined) topics of a paper and their appearance and disappearance in different sections. I came up with this exercise as a result of these ideas. Note: I teach in a classroom that provides a computer to each student. Still, this exercise could, with only a little effort, be repeated with laptops or outside of class time. Voyeur does allow users to export all data, so it would be fairly simple to share work.

First, have students upload their papers to Voyeur. If they have multiple revisions of a paper, all the better, as it allows a comparison of the iterations of their writing. After setting the stop words and exploring the different word frequencies of their own work, students should then trade and look at a peer’s work. This switch allows the students to avoid being biased by what they think the paper is about and instead focus on what Voyeur shows. Here are a few instructions I have come up with for students to ask:

Use Voyeur to see if you can get an idea of the paper’s thesis and how the argument progresses without reading the paper.

What can you determine about the paper's organization?
What words are most common? What words would you expect to be most common based on the thesis?
What words rise and fall (or do not) in frequency together? Would you expect them to do so?
How can you revise your paper so that the most important words to the argument appear more frequently or in more effective combinations?

I have tested this technique on some of my own writing and found that it does, in fact, reveal some interesting patterns. For example, in one essay I wrote, I juggle three major topics, which rise and fall in sequence through the paper. It was surprising to me to see just how regularly the paper followed that pattern, in fact, and confirmed that I had organized it in a logical manner that accords with my argument. What other uses might you suggest for Voyeur? Are there other questions you think I could pose for students as they use this tool to analyze their own writing? Do you know of other tools that might be useful for this exercise?

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

Play around with Voyeur first.

Instructions For Students:

Download the file containing your essay.

Go to the Voyeur website

Upload the file via the "Upload" link.

Hit "Reveal".

Select the gear icon in the upper left box titled "Cirrus". Select the "Taporware (English)" stop words list to remove common words like "the", "a", "and", etc. from the word cloud.

Shrink the text-view window by clicking the arrows on the bar on the far right. This action will reveal several new windows, including a word frequency chart.

Explore various word frequency combinations to see if the most common words in your paper match your thesis, to see how different, important words vary in frequency throughout the paper, and how word combinations appear (or do not).

Have a peer look at the graphs you've created and see if they can determine the main topics of your paper from them. Trade places with your peer; explore one another's texts using Voyeur to see if you can get an idea of the paper's thesis and how the argument progresses without reading the paper.

What can you determine about your paper's organization?

What words are most common? What words would you expect to be most common based on your thesis?

What words rise and fall (or do not) in frequency together? Would you expect them to do so?

How can you revise your paper so that the most important words to your argument appear more frequently or in more effective combinations?

Evaluation Suggestions:

None

Course Type:

Advanced Writing Course

Intermediate Writing Course

Introductory Writing Course

Literary Studies Course

Course Description:

Why do we read literature? What, if anything, do we get out of literature that makes it important? What cognitive faculties to we use when we read and how do those faculties effect or even determine our interpretations? In this course, we will explore these and related questions in order to introduce students to the study of English literature through criticism focused on how the mind works. We will emphasize, in particular, the rapidly growing field of cognitive literary studies, which applies the findings of contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience to traditional humanities questions about the nature of literature, the practice of reading, and the possibilities of interpretation. We will read selections from some of the leading cognitive scientists and cognitive literary theorists and test their theories and methods through our own interpretations of primary literary texts. We will also discuss the history and practice of psychoanalytic critical approaches like Freudian, Lacanian, and feminist theories. We will read an eclectic mixture of literary works including contemporary science fiction, classic novels and short stories, and medieval and Renaissance poetry.

As an introduction to the study of English literature and preparation for upper-division English courses at UT, this course will also focus on developing the fundamental skills of close reading, critical writing, research, and critical analysis. In other words, this course is not primarily about psychology. Instead, that is the lens through which we will view our primary object of study: literature. We will receive an introduction to various formal, historical, and cultural approaches to literary texts, all of which will use some form of psychology. We will also learn how to use the Oxford English Dictionary and other resources central to literary studies.

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