Lab Session1: Digital Humanities: CLiC - etc

A Hands-On Exploration of CLiC, Voyant, and Digital Reading

Welcome to my academic blog! In this post, In the growing field of Digital Humanities, the combination of technology and literary studies is changing the way we think about literature, authorship, and the creative process. This blog reflects on Lab Session 1, an interesting practical activity designed by Dilip P. Barad. The session encouraged us to think about an important question: Can machines create poetry in the same way humans do? We first explored this question through discussion and then tested our own ability to identify whether a poem was written by a human or generated by a computer.

Along with this discussion, we also explored different digital tools for studying literary texts. We worked with CLiC, including the Dickens Project and Activity Book, and also experimented with Voyant Tools and Orange. These activities helped me understand how digital methods such as text analysis, corpus study, and data visualisation can add new perspectives to traditional literary studies. In this blog, I will share my experience of using these platforms and discuss what I learned from combining technology with the study of literature.

Here is the Mind Map :

Here is the detailed infograph of this blog :

Here is the slide deck  of this blog :

digital-humanities-bridging-algorithmic-analysis-and-literary-interpretation from Khushi Parmar

Explore the earlier debate about whether machines can write poetry:

I began the session with an interesting question from our assigned reading: Can a machine really write poetry? Since poetry is often connected with human emotions, imagination, and personal experiences, I found it quite surprising to think that a computer could also produce something that sounds like a poem.

To explore this idea practically, I participated in an interactive poetry quiz by NPR. The activity presented different poems and asked me to identify whether they were written by a human or created by a computer. It was an interesting way to test my ability to recognize the difference between human creativity and machine-generated poetry.

                     My final results from the NPR Turing test for poetry.

1.My Personal Experience:

The quiz was much more challenging than I expected. At first, I thought I would quickly recognize which poems were created by a machine, but some of the computer-generated poems sounded natural and emotionally powerful. This experience made me question my assumptions about machine-written literature. I understood that the way we experience a poem often depends on how we, as readers, understand and interpret its words, rather than simply knowing who created it.

2. Exploring CLiC Through Distant Reading

After completing the poetry activity, I moved on to the CLiC (Corpus Linguistics in Context) web application. This activity introduced me to the idea of “distant reading,” where instead of reading a literary work from beginning to end, we examine the entire text digitally to identify repeated words, patterns, and interesting language choices. For this activity, I selected Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four.

other Representation:

I was interested in understanding how women are presented in the novel. To explore this, I searched for the words "old"in the text. The concordance results allowed me to see these words in their surrounding contexts and helped me notice the different words and descriptions associated with female characters throughout the novel.

Focusing on Character Dialogue: After that, I decided to examine how the idea of “Woman” appears in the novel. One useful feature of CLiC was the option to search only within the “Quotes” section. I entered the word “justice” and applied the filter. This helped me focus specifically on the characters’ conversations and understand how they themselves talked about justice, rather than including the descriptions and comments provided by the narrator.

3. Visualizing through Voyant Tools

I also explored Voyant Tools to examine the theme of justice in The Sign of the Four. The visualization helped me see the frequency and distribution of important terms across the text. In the results, “justice” appeared 10 times, while terms such as “concordance,” “tag,” “themes,” and “search” also appeared frequently. The trend graph showed how these terms were distributed across different parts of the document. This activity helped me understand how digital tools can make literary patterns easier to identify and study visually.

4. What My Group and I Learned

After completing the activities, I discussed my experience with my group members. Our conversation helped us understand how digital tools can support the study of literature in new ways.

Combining Traditional and Digital Methods: We understood that tools such as Voyant and CLiC cannot replace close reading or literary interpretation. Instead, they provide useful data that can strengthen our ideas and help us support our interpretations with evidence from the text.

Becoming Comfortable with Technology: At first, some of us found the digital tools and their features slightly confusing. However, we realized that learning to use such platforms is important for literature students because technology has become an important part of modern academic research.

Developing New Ways of Reading: The activities also changed the way we look at literary texts. Along with asking what a text means, we can now investigate which words appear most often, where they occur, and how they are used in different contexts.

Overall, this lab session gave me a new perspective on literary studies. It showed me how traditional reading and digital methods can work together to create a deeper understanding of literature.

Personal Learning Outcome

• This activity helped me identify which characters talk about justice and understand the meaning behind their statements in different situations, such as Holmes focusing on solving cases, Watson considering moral questions, or other characters connecting justice with revenge.

• I learned how to organize and classify concordance lines according to different speakers, which makes it easier to compare their views and identify recurring patterns in the representation of justice.

References :

What if Machines Write Poems. blog.dilipbarad.com/2017/03/what-if-machines-write-poems.html.

CLic

Voyant Tools