Today’s plan:
- Article Pass #2: Semantic Analysis
- Homework
Article Pass #2: Semantic Analysis
Go ahead and open up the Google Doc in which you wrote your summary. Let’s start by revisiting our collective notes from Wednesday’s class on how to do a semantic analysis:
- High occuring words
- Definition of words–Oxford English Dictionary
- Shifts in tone
- Wordle.net, tagcrowd
We are going to use these four suggestions to put our research articles under microscopes. I actually want to begin with the most distance, and then move closer. You should write up each of these activities as notes; for homework I will ask you to revise them into a more coherent analysis.
Analysis #1: Wordle.net (about 15 minutes) For the first analysis, I’m going to ask you to feed your article into Wordle.net. To do this, you will have to copy/paste the text of your article. NOTE: not all .pdf’s are ready to copy and paste, so we might have to open Adobe Acrobat Professional (not Reader) and make the text recognizable. Here are some instructions for making PDF text recognizable.
Then we put it into Wordle. Note that Wordle requires Java, which Google Chrome no longer supports. So, if you are a Chrome user like me, then you will have to open another browser. Once it has made your Wordle, click the “save as png” button on the bottom-right of the image. Save it to your local computer, but then upload the file into your Google Drive so that you have it. Insert the Worlde into your Google Doc.
I selected an article I am currently working with, Brumberger and Lauer’s “The Evolution of Technical Communication.” I got the following Wordle:
What can we do with this image? First, we can simply write a list of the five biggest words (ignoring repetition). Then we can jot down a few notes about each–what do they mean to the author? What are their significance?
Second, we can look for any proper names other than the author(s)’s–I find two, Henschel and Blythe.
Third, we can try to identify words that stuck out to us during the first pass–what do we remember?
I’m going to ask you to take a few minutes and free write in your Google Doc.
Analysis #2: OED (About 10 minutes) How we move onto the second analysis. This is more of a heuristic analysis. Heuristic is a disciplinary term stretching back to ancient Greek for inventive or generative. We are going to use the Oxford English Dictionary, or the OED. The OED is a pretty amazing semantic tool, since it traces words back to their origins and offers examples of usage throughout history. If I put in “heuristic,” then here’s what I get. I want you to spend a few minutes and look up some of the keyword you identified via the Wordle. Write anything interesting/elucidating in your Google Doc.
Analysis #3: High Occuring Words
Now that we’ve done this preliminary work, I want you to go back through the article. What passages did you mark off? What words did you write at the top of the page? What stands out to you now? What terms that you thought were significant didn’t appear in the Wordle? Take 7 minutes and look at the article.
Analysis #4: Shifts in Tone
Here I want you to look for something specific–places in the text where the author(s) use I (or we). Focus in on what the author’s are claiming/asserting/defending.
Homework
As Mueller notes in his article, and as the OED confirms, this is a heuristic activity. It doesn’t guarantee that you will get unquestionably valuable results. But it isn’t a random shot in the dark, either. Hopefully you have gotten something valuable out of today’s activity. For homework, I want you to go back over what you have done today and turn it into 300 or so meaningful, interesting words.
Here is some kind of idea of what this might look like.
Bring a print copy of your 300 word analysis/synthesis to class on Monday. We will be meeting in Candeleria.
