After working with various text-mining tools, such as Wordle and Voyant, it has become apparent that such tools are not necessarily useful to a class of this nature. Sure, they provide wonderful representations of the more frequently used words and phrases within texts, and could be used from a historical standpoint to draw conclusions in regards to reoccurring theme seen in speeches across time periods, or something of that manner, but I personally think they’re much more useful in an English classroom. To me, history is less about the words and more about the experiences and actions. Seeing which words are used most often really tells us nothing other than the topic of some text, or that the speaker didn’t have access to a decent thesaurus.

That being said, these tools are super interesting, and I had a lot of fun using them to analyze my own work! From a fiction standpoint, they’re very helpful in drawing conclusions about reoccurring themes or motifs, and can shed a lot of light on the meanings behind a work. It’s in the realms of history and science that I find them to be much less useful.

In regards to my final project, I think I’ve finally got it all together! Sure, there are a few things I’m still a tad bit iffy about, and I’d love to further elaborate on them with a wider array of sources and artifacts, but, given the parameters of the project, I’m confident in my final product! Locating the artifacts really wasn’t the hard part, it was putting them in context with one another and creating a coherent and interesting story using such unique pieces of information from all different time periods and perspectives.

I’m really interested to see how things turn out, and what conclusions I’m ultimately able to draw from my work.