Everything digital now

I once blogged half-jokingly about topic modeling as the gateway drug to digital history.  It turns out though that I might we be addicted to doing history digitally.  In preparing for a upcoming conference in which I plan to talk about the aspect of "play" in the yarn bombing of Ishknits in Philadelphia I started doing some online research.

Photo of Ishknits Yarnbomb of Rocky Statue in Philadelphia

While I quickly compiled a list of words that re-occurred, in the sort of old school, pre-digital textual analysis I've been doing for decades

Warm fuzzy cozy

Gentle soft quiet

Mom mother grandma grandmothers granny

I longed to run all the stuff I was reading online through AntConc.  I hit up some databases first Ebsco, but kept only finding ways to email myself plain text individually with the result in the email field itself not as a file.  YUCK that involves way too many steps for a paper I'm giving in just over a week #gulp. 

sigh, googles reminds me I have downthemall a Firefox add-on installed already!  I figure out that if I first save results into a folder I can then use download helper to export links as individual files.  SQUUUUEEEE  Update, data still messy so ended up using antconc to generate word list then used junk that popped up high to create stop words list to filter junk out.  That only took me an entire day to get 432 articles.

Using metadata provided I can also see information about location of publication by continent (and drill down further), by year, and by source.

The only downside is that there is no way to save more than one article to a folder at a time in news bank so there is a pause between each #sigh

results to come

preliminary results from Antconc

the absolute context for yarnbombing is art (second highest content word after yarn) with first collocate public and cluster street art.

Next common is a  a comparison to graffiti (about a 75% less frequent than art).* 

Also popping up very high cognates of grandma grannys granny  grandmothers  grandmother

cognates of Mother 

and also guerrilla (73) as associated with the creators of yarnbombing (most frequent collocates are variation on knitters)

*  graffiti 249  misspellings graffitied graffitti grafiti = 8
guerrilla 44 guerilla18, guerrillas 11