| HK-50011-12 | Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Implementation Grants | University of California, Berkeley | WordSeer: A Text Analysis Environment for Literature Study | 9/1/2012 - 5/31/2015 | $228,546.00 | Marti | | Hearst | | | | University of California, Berkeley | Berkeley | CA | 94704-5940 | USA | 2012 | Literature, General | Digital Humanities Implementation Grants | Digital Humanities | 228546 | 0 | 227509.39 | 0 | Further development of the WordSeer platform, which provides computational analysis and visualization tools for literary researchers. The platform will be available for general use but also will include three new case studies based on three different text collections: interviews and writings of North American slaves (University of California, Berkeley); the works of Stephen Crane (Emory University); and the complete works of Shakespeare (University of Calgary).
This project will continue on the success of a Digital Humanities Startup grant (HD-51244-11) to produce a software environment for literary text analysis. Literature study is a cycle of reading, interpretation, exploration, and understanding. Called WordSeer, this software system integrates tools for automated processing of text with interaction techniques that support the interpretive, exploratory, and note-taking aspects of scholarship. Development of the tool follows best practices surrounding user-centered design and evaluation. At present, the system supports grammatical search and contextual similarity determination, visualization of patterns of word context. This implementation grant will allow for incorporating additional tools to aid comparison, exploration, grouping, and hypothesis formation, and to make the software more robust and therefore sharable and usable by a wide community of scholars. |