I just ran across this very helpful index of text analysis and processing tools from the UT Scarborough library. Many of the tools mentioned have a web interface. Some have been deprecated, but I think it is still worth a look! https://find.digital.utsc.utoronto.ca/text_analysis. Please reach out if you know of a more current or comprehensive index.
Constellate has now added 44 of their most-demanded instructional sessions to their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Constellate_org. Check them out if you are looking for a way to start applying text analysis techniques to your research problem!
This inventory of digital humanities workshops prepared by H-France may be of interest to those looking for learning content to replace the soon-to-be discontinued series at Constellate: https://h-france.net/h-france-dh-workshops/
We just finished performing optical character recognition on the recoverable sources from the Parisian Parliamentarians Project. Check out this nice interactive visualization of the source text. We will continue to organize the original scans and upload their .txt equivalents in the project repository.
Here is a hot-off-the-presses notice about this year’s edition of the Text Analysis Pedagogy Institute. It is free to attend, and workshop attendance now permits participants to claim a badge!
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This society may be of interest to those pursuing digital humanities projects on a topic in French history: https://h-france.net/. The index of (digital) primary sources it maintains is particularly comprehensive: https://h-france.net/professional-resources/research-tools/.
For those who might be interested in experimenting with text analysis I highly recommend Melanie Walsh’s guide. It walks researchers through the basics of installing and using Python, data collection, and applying text modelling tools. Researchers can even experiment with running the code directly on the website. Those interested in smaller guides to specific portions of the research pipeline can find a wealth of notebooks on the Constellate GitHub site.
I recently had a chance to demo some of the tools bundled with Sketch Engine. One cool feature it offers is the ability to create a custom corpus by scraping public domain texts off the web using to user-defined keywords. I created a small corpus of French texts dealing with Jean Bodin’s work on sovereignty and then generated an six-word n-gram and a keyword analysis. The keyword analysis is a particularly interesting feature of Sketch Engine that compares the frequency of terms in your corpus with their frequency in a reference corpus. So keyword ranking could be interpreted as a measure of the ‘salience’ of certain concepts within a corpus.
Here is a screenshot of the n-gram I generated:
Assuming that the texts Sketch Engine collated are either primary source or scholarly, this n-gram shows that while Bodin is quite concerned with identifying the location of sovereignty, the concepts of the republic and the government feature much more prominently than the person of the king.
Here is a screenshot of the keyword analysis I generated:
This multi-word keyword analysis really just demonstrates that Bodin’s approach to constitutional theory is legalistic, and that an analyst of Bodin’s work needs to figure out the conceptual relationship between sovereignty and absolutism.
Lucas Jerusalimiec 