Reading with Machines

For a while now, I've been stealthing digital history into my courses.  This semester I'm teaching the second part of US history survey which seemed a great place to introduce a captive audience to the wonder that is #Dhist.   Below is our first lesson, using the gateway "wordle" from Voyant.  I'd love feedback on this lesson for next week.




What happens when we read with machines? or to put it another way, how does letting a computer "read" a text in ways our brain normally doesn't allow us to understand the text differently?  There are a lot of ways to read with machines.  I'm going to show you one, very elementary way of getting familiar with what machines can do.  For more advances uses, you need to learn a bit more computer stuff.

This week we read a bunch of stuff* and you wrote analyses that required you to pick out quotes in support of your answer.  All of the materials were brief and your brains are really good at finding the important stuff in short documents.

We also discussed Helen Hunt Jackson's Century of Dishonor.  That is a long book and thus I have not had you read it, but what if we used it as our text to read with machines?   Then what if we compared that romantic novel to The Dawes Act using machines, because it turns out that reading legislation is often BORING.

Century of Dishonor, most frequent words WITH all the "small words" (stop words) removed





The Dawes Act most frequent words WITH all the "small words" (stop words) removed





Looking at these visualizations can lead us to ask some interesting questions about the texts.

• What jumps out at you first?  
• What words would you expect to see bigger (meaning more frequent) in a law versus in a novel and vice versa?  
• What words aren't there that you might expect to see?  
• What are the most interesting comparisons between the two visualizations?  
• What questions might that lead us to ask when we look more closely at the texts?

Reading:

3. EVALUATING PRIMARY SOURCES: "SAVING" THE INDIANS IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Sources: "Land and Law as Agents in Educating Indians" (1885)
The Dawes Act (1887)
A Cheyenne Tells His Son About the Land (1876)
Cheyennes Try Farming (ca. 1877)
A Sioux Recalls Severalty (ca. 1900)
Supervised Indian Land Holdings by State, 1881-1933
A Proposal for Indian Education (1888)
Instructions to Indian Agents and Superintendents of Indian Schools (1889)
The Education of Indian Students at Carlisle (1891)
Luther Standing Bear Recalls Carlisle (1933)
Wohaw's Self-Portrait (1877)
Taking an Indian Child to School (1891)
 A Crow Medicine Woman on Teaching the Young (1932)
Percentage of Population Over Ten Illiterate, 1900-1930.