Since the start of this semester, I must say that in revisiting some Digital Humanities tools like Voyant, XML, and TEI my ability and capability to maneuver with them have strengthened. I am truly happy that I was able to deeper my knowledge of these tools due to the fact that in the first semester everything was initially new to me. I was not the typical tech-savvy student nor did I know how to code using XML or TEI. Learning how to use these tools in the first semester was quite overwhelming and challenging. However, due to the fact that Dr. Esprit revisited these tools and further explained how to use them as well as the related terms and concepts of these tools, my understanding has truly deepened.
Now, as a Digital Humanities student who will soon begin working on an individual DH project as well as contribute to a larger group project, I now see how knowledge of all these tools will definitely come in handy. Seeing that I will also have to pick a tool or two to bring my individual project idea to life, then my interest in each tool has increased over the past few weeks. The tool Voyant which uses topic modeling or text mining to identify trends or patterns in a corpus was especially interesting to me since I believe it would be a great addition to my Individual project.
My work on the larger Writers, Readers and Scenes: Visualizing Caribbean Literary Encounters was quite time-consuming yet it was very interesting. I was tasked with cleaning the data in the Title column. I would also find myself translating the Titles that were not in English and entering the translated items in the Original Language Publication column. My work in the columns didn't necessarily teach me anything about the literature in it however, it did spike my interest in a specific genre of books and so it was in doing data cleaning in the spreadsheet I received inspiration for my individual project.
All in all, I hope that my knowledge of these tools will benefit me and will bring all the ideas of the project I wish to complete to life.