Digital Pedagogy: Text Analysis

What is text analysis?

Text analysis projects look for, analyze, and sometimes visualize patterns across bodies of textual data.

Learning objectives for digital assignments

Learning objectives are clearly defined statements of expected goals and outcomes from the student perspective. When a student finishes an activity or a lesson, what will they know, articulate, or be able to do?

Every digital pedagogy project should have learning objectives. Here are a few tips for creating student-centered objectives:

• Relate the project to course objectives - what's the purpose of this digital element? Examples may include learning the digital tool, applying class knowledge, or communicating their research.
• Consider transferable skills (creating a visual argument) rather than hard skills (use a dashboard in Tableau).
• Create a rubric around the learning objectives to use when evaluating students' work.
• Focus on the process, not the final product. 

Getting started: try Bloom's Taxonomy Action Verbs for sample action verbs to use in learning objectives.

Example learning objectives for text analysis 

Students will be able to...

• compare language use across a poet’s entire oeuvre to determine thematic shifts in the poet’s writing over time.
• work with large bodies of text to choose an effective corpus, choose stop words, recognize potential for bias and error, and decide on a method of analysis.

Tools & Tutorials

 Below are tools and guides to help you start a text analysis project:

  Voyant - a web-based, user-friendly tool for analyzing text.

  Poemage - an open-source text visualization application for close reading.

  Hathitrust Research Center - a set of software tools that allow for text mining and  computational analysis of Hathitrust texts.

  Project Gutenburg - a free collection of digital texts that can be downloaded and analyzed.

  Python - Python is a free programming language that can manage large amounts of data and has packages built for text analysis. 

See the Research Hub events calendar for upcoming workshops on Python.

Icon "text" by ProSymbols from the Noun Project

Finding Help

Library Support

To get started with digital pedagogy and lesson planning after exploring this guide, contact Sarah Morris (semorris@email.unc.edu or (919) 962-2094).

• To work with a subject specialist, contact your Subject Librarian from Research and Instructional Services.
• For project planning and technical support, schedule a consultation with a text analysis specialist from the Davis Library Research Hub.
• For help working with design and media, contact Winifred Fordham Metz (freddie@email.unc.edu), head of the Media & Design Center.

Table of Contents 

• What is text analysis?
• Creating learning objectives
• Tools & tutorials
• Sample project gallery
• Finding help