Final Project Revision
Professor: “What inspired you to do this project?” Student: “The due date” – Twitter:@CollegeStudent
Before this week, Matt and I pondered about utilizing our technical Engineering skills to apply to our Digital Humanities final project. Our initial plans was to involve robotics and data tracking into our project. This plan proved to be extremely limited as we could not come up with meaningful factors to track within the realm of Digital Humanities. Also, creating a robot (As suggested by some of the students in our class) that performs a specific DH task is not inexpensive and not to mention, difficult. Therefore, due to the looming presence of uncertainty within these initial plans, Matt and I decided to change our project to text analysis.
Our revised final project will be on the text analysis of past versus present science fiction books. We will be looking into textual differences such as, amount of positive versus negative words, frequency of story-significant words, text patterns, grammatical relationships, and more. The goal will be to yield relevant statistical data that will bring us to qualitatively analyze the differences between past and present science fiction literature. Although, this is a completely different project compared to our initial plans, we still plan to utilize our technical skills to properly gather and analyze all of our data.
Due to our lack of coding experience, we will be using pre-existing coding software to analyze our texts. Next, we will look for books that can be easily converted into .txt or .pdf file. Our sample size will be around twenty books, ten old and ten recent. The publication timeline of the old science fiction books will be from the late 19th century to early 20th, while the more recent books will come from the 21st century.