Planet Eric Lease Morgan Home Alex Catalogue Serials Blog Musings Planet Sandbox Writings Catholic Portal DH @ Notre Dame LiAM: Linked Archival Metadata Life of a Librarian Mini-musings Musings Readings Water collection About this planet Timeline view February 09, 2020 Life of a Librarian OpenRefine and the Distant Reader The student, researcher, or scholar can use OpenRefine to open one or more different types of delimited files. OpenRefine will then parse the file(s) into fields. It can makes many things easy such as finding/replacing, faceting (think “grouping”), filtering (think “searching”), sorting, clustering (think “normalizing/cleannig”), counting & tabulating, and finally, exporting data. OpenRefine is an excellent go-between when spreadsheets fail and full-blown databases are too hard to use. OpenRefine eats delimited files for lunch. Many (actually, most) of the files in a study carrel are tab-delimited files, and they will import into OpenRefine with ease. For example, after all a carrel’s part-of-speech (pos) files are imported into OpenRefine, the student, researcher, or scholar can very easily count, tabulate, search (filter), and facet on nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. If the named entities files (ent) are imported, then it is easy to see what types of entities exist and who might be the people mentioned in the carrel: Facets (counts & tabulations) of parts-of-speech Most frequent nouns Types of named-entities Who is mentioned in a file and how often OpenRefine recipes Like everything else, using OpenRefine requires practice. The problem to solve is not so much learning how to use OpenRefine. Instead, the problem to solve is to ask and answer interesting questions. That said, the student, researcher, or scholar will want to sort the data, search/filter the data, and compare pieces of the data to other pieces to articulate possible relationships. The following recipes endeavor to demonstrate some such tasks. The first is to simply facet (count & tabulate) on parts-of-speech files: Download, install, and run OpenRefine Create a new project and as input, randomly chose any file from a study carrel’s part-of-speech (pos) directory Continue to accept the defaults, and continue with “Create Project »”; the result ought to be a spreadsheet-like interface Click the arrow next to the POS column and select Facet/Text facet from the resulting menu; the result ought to be a new window containing a column of words and a column of frequencies — counts & tabulations of each type of part-of-speech in the file Go to Step #4, until you get tired, but this time facet by other values Faceting is a whole like like “grouping” in the world of relational databases. Faceting alphabetically sorts a list and then counts the number of times each item appears in the list. Different types of works have different parts-of-speech ratios. For example, it is not uncommon for there to be a preponderance of past-tense verbs stories. Counts & tabulations of personal pronouns as well as proper nouns give senses of genders. A more in-depth faceting against adjectives allude to sentiment. This recipe outlines how to filter (“search”): Click the “Remove All” button, if it exists; this ought to reset your view of the data Click the arrow next to the “token” column and select “Text filter” from the resulting menu In your mind, think of a word of interest, and enter it into the resulting search box Take notice of how the content in the spreadsheet view changes Go to Step #3 until you get tired Click the “Remove All” button to reset the view Text filter on the “token” column but search for “^N” (which is code for any noun) and make sure the “regular expression” check box is… checked Text facet on the “lemma” column; the result ought to be a count & tabulation of all the nouns Go to Step #6, but this time search for “^V” or “^J”, which are the codes for any verb or any adjective, respectively By combining the functionalities of faceting and filtering the student, researcher, or scholar can investigate the original content more deeply or at least in different ways. The use of OpenRefine in this way is akin to leafing through book or a back-of-the-book index. As patterns & anomalies present themselves, they can be followed up more thoroughly through the use of a concordance and literally see the patterns & anomalies in context. This recipe answers the question, “Who is mentioned in a corpus, and how often?“: Download, install, and run OpenRefine Create a new project and as input, select all of the files in the named-entity (ent) directory Continue to accept the defaults, but remember, all the almost all of the files in a study carrel are tab-delimited files, so remember to import them as “CSV / TSV / separator-based files”, not Excel files Continue to accept the defaults, and continue with “Create Project »”; the result ought to be a spreadsheet-like interface Click the arrow next to “type” column and select Facet/Text facet from the resulting menu; the result ought to be a new window containing a column of words and a column of frequencies — counts & tabulations of each type of named-entity in the whole of the study carrel Select “PERSON” from the list of named entities; the result ought to be a count & tabulation of the names of the people mentioned in the whole of the study carrel Go to Step #5 until tired, but each time select a different named-entity value This final recipe is a visualization: Create a new parts-of-speech or named-entity project Create any sort of meaningful set of faceted results Select the “choices” link; the result ought to be a text area containing the counts & tabulation Copy the whole of the resulting text area Paste the result into your text editor, find all tab characters and change them to colons (:), copy the whole of the resulting text Open Wordle and create a word cloud with the contents of your clipboard; word counts may only illustrate frequencies, but sometimes the frequencies are preponderance. A study carrel’s parts-of-speech (pos) and named-entities (ent) files enumerate each and every word or named-entity in each and every sentence of each and every item in the study carrel. Given a question relatively quantitative in nature and pertaining to parts-of-speech or named-entities, the pos and ent files are likely to be able to address the question. The pos and ent files are tab-delimited files, and OpenRefine is a very good tool for reading and analyzing such files. It does much more than was outlined here, but enumerating them here is beyond scope. Such is left up to the… reader. by Eric Lease Morgan at February 09, 2020 09:19 PM February 06, 2020 Life of a Librarian Topic Modeling Tool – Enumerating and visualizing latent themes Technically speaking, topic modeling is an unsupervised machine learning process used to extract latent themes from a text. Given a text and an integer, a topic modeler will count & tabulate the frequency of words and compare those frequencies with the distances between the words. The words form “clusters” when they are both frequent and near each other, and these clusters can sometimes represent themes, topics, or subjects. Topic modeling is often used to denote the “aboutness” of a text or compare themes between authors, dates, genres, demographics, other topics, or other metadata items. Topic Modeling Tool is a GUI/desktop topic modeler based on the venerable MALLET suite of software. It can be used in a number of ways, and it is relatively easy to use it to: list five distinct themes from the Iliad and the Odyssey, compare those themes between books, and, assuming each chapter occurs chronologically, compare the themes over time. Simple list of topics Topics distributed across a corpus Comparing the two books of Homer Topics compared over time Topic Modeling Tool Recipes These few recipes are intended to get you up and running when it comes to Topic Modeling Tool. They are not intended to be a full-blown tutorial. This first recipe merely divides a corpus into the default number of topics and dimensions: Download and install Topic Modeling Tool Copy (not move) the whole of the txt directory to your computer’s desktop Create a folder/directory named “model” on your computer’s desktop Open Topic Modeling Tool Specify the “Input Dir…” to be the txt folder/directory on your desktop Specify the “Output Dir…” to be the folder/directory named “model” on your desktop Click “Learn Topics”; the result ought to be a a list of ten topics (numbered 0 to 9), and each topic is denoted with a set of scores and twenty words (“dimensions”), and while functional, such a result is often confusing This recipe will make things less confusing: Change the number of topics from the default (10) to five (5) Click the “Optional Settings…” button Change the “The number of topic words to print” to something smaller, say five (5) Click the “Ok” button Click “Learn Topics”; the result will include fewer topics and fewer dimensions, and the result will probably be more meaningful, if not less confusing There is no correct number of topics to extract with the process of topic modeling. “When considering the whole of Shakespeare’s writings, what is the number of topics it is about?” This being the case, repeat and re-repeat the previous recipe until you: 1) get tired, or 2) feel like the results are at least somewhat meaningful. This recipe will help you make the results even cleaner by removing nonsense from the output: Copy the file named “stopwords.txt” from the etc directory to your desktop Click “Optional Settings…”; specify “Stopword File…” to be stopwords.txt; click “Ok” Click “Learn Topics” If the results contain nonsense words of any kind (or words that you just don’t care about), edit stopwords.txt to specify additional words to remove from the analysis Go to Step #3 until you get tired; the result ought to be topics with more meaningful words Adding individual words to the stopword list can be tedious, and consequently, here is a power-user’s recipe to accomplish the same goal: Identify words or regular expressions to be excluded from analysis, and good examples include all numbers (\d+), all single-letter words (\b\w\b), or all two-letter words (\b\w\w\b) Use your text editor’s find/replace function to remove all occurrences of the identified words/patterns from the files in the txt folder/directory; remember, you were asked to copy (not move) the whole of the txt directory, so editing the files in the txt directory will not effect your study carrel Run the topic modeling process Go to Step #1 until you: 1) get tired, or 2) are satisfied with the results Now that you have somewhat meaningful topics, you will probably want to visualize the results, and one way to do that is to illustrate how the topics are dispersed over the whole of the corpus. Luckily, the list of topics displayed in the Tool’s console is tab-delimited, making it easy to visualize. Here’s how: Topic model until you get a set of topics which you think is meaningful Copy the resulting topics, and this will include the labels (numbers 0 through n), the scores, and the topic words Open your spreadsheet application, and paste the topics into a new sheet; the result ought to be three columns of information (labels, scores, and words) Sort the whole sheet by the second column (scores) in descending numeric order Optionally replace the generic labels (numbers 0 through n) with a single meaningful word, thus denoting a topic Create a pie chart based on the contents of the first two columns (labels and scores); the result will appear similar to an illustration above and it will give you an idea of how large each topic is in relation to the others Because of a great feature in Topic Modeling Tool it is relatively easy to compare topics against metadata values such as authors, dates, formats, genres, etc. To accomplish this goal the raw numeric information output by the Tool (the actual model) needs to be supplemented with metadata, the data then needs to be pivoted, and subsequently visualized. This is a power-user’s recipe because it requires: 1) a specifically shaped comma-separated values (CSV) file, 2) Python and a few accompanying modules, and 3) the ability to work from the command line. That said, here’s a recipe to compare & contrast the two books of Homer: Copy the file named homer-books.csv to your computer’s desktop Click “Optional Settings…”; specify “Metadata File…” to be homer-books.csv; click “Ok” Click “Learn Topics”; the result ought to pretty much like your previous results, but the underlying model has been enhanced Copy the file named pivot.py to your computer’s desktop When the modeling is complete, open up a terminal application and navigate to your computer’s desktop Run the pivot program (python pivot.py); the result ought to an error message outlining the input pivot.py expects Run pivot.py again, but this time give it input; more specifically, specify “./model/output_csv/topics-metadata.csv” as the first argument (Windows users will specify .\model\output_csv\topics-metadata.csv), specify “barh” for the second argument, and “title” as the third argument; the result ought to be a horizontal bar chart illustrating the differences in topics across the Iliad and the Odyssey, and ask yourself, “To what degree are the books similar?” The following recipe is very similar to the previous recipe, but it illustrates the ebb & flow of topics throughout the whole of the two books: Copy the file named homer-chapters.csv to your computer’s desktop Click “Optional Settings…”; specify “Metadata File…” to be homer-chapters.csv; click “Ok” Click “Learn Topics” When the modeling is complete, open up a terminal application and navigate to your computer’s desktop Run pivot.py and specify “./model/output_csv/topics-metadata.csv” as the first argument (Windows users will specify .\model\output_csv\topics-metadata.csv), specify “line” for the second argument, and “title” as the third argument; the result ought to be a line chart illustrating the increase & decrease of topics from the beginning of the saga to the end, and ask yourself “What topics are discussed concurrently, and what topics are discussed when others are not?” Topic modeling is an effective process for “reading” a corpus “from a distance”. Topic Modeling Tool makes the process easier, but the process requires practice. Next steps are for the student to play with the additional options behind the “Optional Settings…” dialog box, read the Tool’s documentation, take a look at the structure of the CSV/metadata file, and take a look under the hood at pivot.py. by Eric Lease Morgan at February 06, 2020 01:41 AM January 31, 2020 Life of a Librarian The Distant Reader and concordancing with AntConc Concordancing is really a process about find, and AntConc is a very useful program for this purpose. Given one or more plain text files, AntConc will enable the student, researcher, or scholar to: find all the occurrences of a word, illustrate where the word is located, navigate through document(s) where the word occurs, list word collocations, and calculate quite a number of useful statistics regarding a word. Concordancing, dating from the 13th Century, is the oldest form of text mining. Think of it as control-F (^f) on steroids. AntConc does all this and more. For example, one can load all of the Iliad and the Odyssey into AntConc. Find all the occurrences of the word ship, visualize where ship appears in each chapter, and list the most significant words associated with the word ship. Occurrences of a word Dispersion charts “interesting” words AntConc recipes This recipe simply implements search: Download and install AntConc Use the “Open Files(s)…” menu option to open all files in the txt directory Select the Concordance tab Enter a word of interest into the search box Click the Start button The result ought to be a list of phrases where the word of interest is displayed in the middle of the screen. In modern-day terms, such a list is called a “key word in context” (KWIC) index. This recipe combines search with “control-F”: Select the Concordance tab Enter a word of interest into the search box Click the Start button Peruse the resulting phrases and click on one of interest; the result ought to a display of a text and the search term(s) is highlighted in the larger context Go to Step #1 until tired This recipe produces a dispersion plot, an illustration of where a search term appears in a document: Select the Concordance tab Enter a word of interest into the search box Select the “Concordance Plot” tab The result will be a list of illustrations. Each illustration will include zero or more vertical lines denoting the location of your search term in a given file. The more lines in each illustrations, the more times the search terms appear in the document. This recipe counts & tabulates the frequency of words: Select the “Word List” tab Click the Start button; the result will be a list of all the words and their frequencies Scroll up and down the list to get a feel for what is common Select a word of interest; the result will be the same as if you entered the word in Recipe #1 It is quite probable the most frequent words will be “stop words” like the, a, an, etc. AntConc supports the elimination of stop words, and the Reader supplies a stop word list. Describing how to implement this functionality is too difficult to put into words. (No puns intended.) But here is an outline: Select the “Tool Preferences” menu option Select the “Word List” category Use the resulting dialog box to select a stop words list, and such a list is called stopwords.txt found in the etc directory Click the Apply button Go to Step #1; and the result will be a frequency list sans any stop words, and the result will be much more meaningful Ideas are rarely articulated through the use of individual words; ideas are usually articulated through the use of sets of words (ngrams, sentences, paragraphs, etc.). Thus, as John Rupert Firth once said, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.” This recipe outlines how to list word co-occurrences and collocations: Select the “Cluster/N-grams” tab Enter a word of interest in the search box Click the Start button; the result ought to be a list of two-word phrases (bigrams) sort in frequency order Select a phrase of interest, and the result will just as if you had search for the phrase in Recipe #1 Go to Step #1 until tired Select the Collocates tab Enter a word of interest in the search box Click the Start button; the result ought to be a list of words and associated scores, and the scores compare the frequencies of the search word and the given word; words with higher scores can be considered “more interesting” Select “Sort by Freq” from the “Sort by” pop-up menu Click the Sort button; the result will be the same list of words and associated scores, but this time the list will be sorted by the frequency of the search term/given word combination Again, a word is known by the company it keeps. Use the co-occurrences and collocations features to learn how a given word (or phrase) is associated with other words. There is much more to AntConc than outlined in the recipes outlined above. Learning more is left up to you, the student, research, and scholar. by Eric Lease Morgan at January 31, 2020 08:02 PM The Distant Reader Workbook I am in the process of writing a/the Distant Reader workbook, which will make its debut at a Code4Lib preconference workshop in March. Below is both the “finished” introduction and table-of-contents. Hands-on with the Distant Reader: A Workbook This workbook outlines sets of hands-on exercises surrounding a computer system called the Distant Reader — https://distantreader.org. By going through the workbook, you will become familiar with the problems the Distant Reader is designed to address, how to submit content to the Reader, how to download the results (affectionately called “study carrels”), and how to interpret them. The bulk of the workbook is about the later. Interpretation can be as simple as reading a narrative report in your Web browser, as complex as doing machine learning, and everything else in-between. You will need to bring very little to the workbook in order to get very much out. At the very least, you will need a computer with a Web browser and an Internet connection. A text editor such as Notepad++ for Windows or BBEdit for Macintosh will come in very handy, but a word processor of any type will do in a pinch. You will want some sort of spreadsheet application for reading tabular data, and Microsoft Excel or Macintosh Numbers will both work quite well. All the other applications used in the workbook are freely available for downloading and cross-platform in nature. You may need to install a Java virtual machine in order to use some of them, but Java is probably already installed on your computer. I hope you enjoy using the Distant Reader. It helps me use and understand large volumes of text quickly and easily. Table of contents I. What is the Distant Reader, and why should I care? A. The Distant Reader is a tool for reading B. How it works C. What it does II. Five different types of input A. Introduction B. A file C. A URL D. A list of URLs E. A zip file F. A zip file with a companion CSV file F. Summary III. Submitting "experiments" and downloading "study carrels" IV. An introduction to study carrels V. The structured data of study carrels; taking inventory through the manifest VI. Using combinations of desktop tools to analyze the data A. Introduction - The three essential types of desktop tools B. Text editors C. Spreadsheet/database applications D. Analysis applications i. Wordle and Wordle recipes ii. AntConc and AntConc recipes iii. Excel and Excel recipes iv. OpenRefine and OpenRefine recipes v. Topic Modeling Tool and Tool recipes VII. Using command-line tools to dig even deeper VIII. Summary/conclusion IX. About the author As per usual these days, the “code” is available on GitHub. by Eric Lease Morgan at January 31, 2020 06:57 PM January 29, 2020 Life of a Librarian Wordle and the Distant Reader Visualized word frequencies, while often considered sophomoric, can be quite useful when it comes to understanding a text, especially when the frequencies are focused on things like parts-of-speech, named entities, or co-occurrences. Wordle visualizes such frequencies very well. For example, the 100 most frequent words in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the 100 most frequent nouns in the Iliad and the Odyssey, or the statistically significant words associated with the word ship from the Iliad and the Odyssey. simple word frequencies frequency of nouns Significant words related to ship Wordle recipes Here is a generic Wordle recipe where Wordle will calculate the frequencies for you: Download and install Wordle. It is a Java application, so you may need to download and install Java along the way, but Java is probably already installed on your computer. Use your text editor to open reader.txt which is located in the etc directory/folder. Once opened, copy all of the text. Open Wordle, select the “Your Text” tab, and paste the whole of the text file into the window. Click the “Wordle” tab and your word cloud will be generated. Use the Wordle’s menu options to customize the output. Congratulations, you have just visualized the whole of your study carrel. Here is another recipe, a recipe where you supply the frequencies (or any other score): Download and install AntConc. Use the “Open Files(s)…” menu option to open any file in the txt directory. Click the “Word list” tab, and then click the “Start” button. The result will be a list of words and their frequencies. Use the “Save Output to Text File…” menu option, and save the frequencies accordingly. Open the resulting file in your spreadsheet. Remove any blank rows, and remove the columns that are not the words and their frequencies Invert the order of the remaining two columns; make the words the first column and the frequencies the second column. Copy the whole of the spreadsheet and paste it into your text editor. Use the text editor’s find/replace function to find all occurrences of the tab character and replace them with the colon (:) character. Copy the whole of the text editor’s contents. Open Wordle, click the “Your text” tab, paste the frequencies into the resulting window. Finally, click the “Wordle” tab to generate the word cloud. Notice how you used a variety of generic applications to achieve the desired result. The word/value pairs given to Wordle do not have be frequencies. Instead they can be any number of different scores or weights. Keep your eyes open for word/value combinations. They are everywhere. Word clouds have been given a bad rap. Wordle is a very useful tool. by Eric Lease Morgan at January 29, 2020 06:13 PM January 18, 2020 Life of a Librarian The Distant Reader and a Web-based demonstration The following is an announcement of a Web-based demonstration to the Distant Reader: Please join us for a web-based demo and Q&A on The Distant Reader, a web-based text analysis toolset for reading and analyzing texts that removes the hurdle of acquiring computational expertise. The Distant Reader offers a ready way to onboard scholars to text analysis and its possibilities. Eric Lease Morgan (Notre Dame) will demo his tool and answer your questions. This session is suitable for digital textual scholars at any level, from beginning to expert. When: February 12, 2020 @ 1-2pm Pacific Standard Time Where: Online (https://ucla.zoom.us/j/3107947789) or at UCLA in 1041 Public Affairs Building The Distant Reader: Reading at scale The Distant Reader is a tool for reading. It takes an arbitrary amount of unstructured data (text) as input, and it outputs sets of structured data for analysis — reading. Given a corpus of just about any size (hundreds of books or thousands of journal articles), the Distant Reader analyzes the corpus, and outputs a myriad of reports enabling the researcher to use and understand the corpus. Designed with college students, graduate students, scientists, or humanists in mind, the Distant Reader is intended to supplement the traditional reading process. This presentation outlines the problems the Reader is intended to address as well as the way it is implemented on the Jetstream platform with the help of both software and personnel resources from XSEDE. The Distant Reader is freely available for anybody to use at https://distantreader.org. Other Distant Reader links of possible interest include: “study carrels” – http://carrels.distantreader.org blog postings – http://sites.nd.edu/emorgan/category/distant-reader/ Slack channel – http://bit.ly/distantreader-slack Twitter feed – http://twitter.com/readerdistant source code – https://github.com/ericleasemorgan/reader ‘Hope to see you there? by Eric Lease Morgan at January 18, 2020 12:07 AM December 28, 2019 Life of a Librarian Distant Reader “study carrels”: A manifest The results of the Distant Reader process is the creation of a “study carrel” — a set of structured data files intended to help you to further “read” your corpus. Using a previously created study carrel as an example, this blog posting enumerates & outlines the contents of a typical carrel. A future blog posting will describe ways to use & understand the files outlined here. Therefore, the text below is merely a kind of manifest. Wall Paper by Eric The Distant Reader takes an arbitrary amount of unstructured data (text) as input, and it outputs sets of structured data files for analysis — reading. Given a corpus of any size, the Distant Reader will analyze the corpus, and it will output a myriad of reports enabling you to use & understand the corpus. The Distant Reader is intended to supplement the traditional reading process. Given a question of a rather quantitative nature, a Distant Reader study carrel may very well contain a plausible answer. The results of downloading and uncompressing the Distant Reader study carrel is a directory/folder containing a standard set of files and subdirectories. Each of these files and subdirectories are listed & described below: A1426341535 – This, or a very similarly named file, is an administrative file, a unique identifier created by the system (Airivata) which processed the study carrel. [1] In the future, this file may not be included. On the other hand, since the file’s name is a unique identifier, then it could be exploited by a developer. adr – This subdirectory contains a set of tab-delimited files. Each file contains a set of email addresses extracted from the documents in your corpus. While the files’ names end in .adr, they are plain text files that can be imported into for favorite spreadsheet, database, or analysis application. The files have two columns: 1) id, and 2) address. The definitions of these columns and possible uses of these files are described elsewhere, but in short, these files can humorously answer the question “Who are you gonna call?” bib – This subdirectory contains a set of tab-delimited files. Each file contains a set of rudimentary bibliographic information from a given document in your corpus. While the files’ names end in .bib, they are plain text files that can be imported into for favorite spreadsheet, database, or analysis application. The files have thirteen columns: 1) id, 2) author, 3) title, 4) date, 5) page 6), extension, 7) mime, 8) words, 9) sentences, 10) flesch, 11) summary, 12) cache, and 13) txt. The definitions of these columns and possible uses of these files are described elsewhere, but in short, these files help answer the question “What items are in my corpus, and how can they be described?” cache – This subdirectory contains original copies of the files you intended for analysis. It is populated by harvesting content from URLs or were supplied in the zip file you uploaded to the Reader. Each file is named with a unique and somewhat meaningful name and an extension. These files are intended for reading on your computer, or better yet, printed and then read in the more traditional manner. css – This subdirectory contains a set of cascading stylesheets used by the HTML files in the carrel. If you really desired, one could edit these files in order to change the appearance of the carrel. input.zip – This file, or something named very similarly, is the file originally used to create your study carrel. It has already served its intended purpose, but it is retained for reasons of provenance. ent – This subdirectory contains a set of tab-delimited files, and each file contains a set of named entities from a given document in your corpus. While the files’ names end in .ent, they are plain text files that can be imported into for favorite spreadsheet, database, or analysis application. The files have five columns: 1) id, 2) sid, 3) eid, 4) entity, and 5) type. The definitions of these columns and possible uses of these files are described elsewhere, but in short, these files help answer questions regarding who, what, when, where, how, and how many. etc – This subdirectory contains a set of ancillary files, and each are described below: model-data.txt – the data file used by topic-model.htm, and it is essentially an enhanced version of reader.txt queries.sql – a set of SQL queries used to generate report.txt, and this file is an excellent introduction to the use of reader.db reader.db – an SQLite database file, and it is essentially the amalgamation of the contents of the adr, bib, ent, pos, urls, and wrd directories; the intelligent use of this file can be used to answer just about any question answerable by the carrel reader.sql – a set SQL commands denoting the structure of reader.db reader.txt – the concatenation of all files in the txt directory; a plain text version of the whole of the corpus is often used for other purposes and it is provided here as a convienence report.txt – the result of applying queries.sql to reader.db; this file has the exact same content as standard-output.txt stopwords.txt – a list of function words (i.e. “a”, “an”, “the”, etc.) used through the creation of the study carrel figures – This subdirectory contains a set of image files used by the carrel’s HTML files: adjectives.png – a word cloud illustrating the most frequent adjectives in the corpus adverbs.png – a word cloud illustrating the most frequent adverbs in the corpus bigrams.png – a word cloud illustrating the most frequent bigrams (two-word phrases) in the corpus flesch-boxplot.png – a box plot illustrating the average, quartile, and outlier readability scores of the items in the corpus flesch-histogram.png – a histogram illustrating the distribution of readability scores of the items in the corpus keywords.png – a word cloud illustrating the most frequent keywords (statistically significant unigrams) in the corpus nouns.png – a word cloud illustrating the most frequent nouns in the corpus pronouns.png – a word cloud illustrating the most frequent pronouns in the corpus proper-nouns.png – a word cloud illustrating the most frequent proper nouns in the corpus sizes-boxplot.png – a box plot illustrating the average, quartile, and outlier sizes of the items (measured in unigrams) in the corpus sizes-histogram.png – a histogram illustrating the distribution of sizes of the items (measured in unigrams) in the corpus topics.png – a pie chart illustrating how the corpus is subdivided if topic modeling were applied to the corpus, and the desired number of topics (latent themes) equals five unigrams.png – a word cloud illustrating the most frequent unigrams (individual words) in the corpus verbs.png – a word cloud illustrating the most frequent verbs in the corpus htm – This subdirectory contains a set of interactive HTML files linked from the file named index.htm. The functionality of each file is outlined below: adjective-noun.htm – search, sort, and browse adjective/noun combinations by adjective, noun, or frequency adjectives.htm – search, sort, and browse adjectives and/or their frequency adverbs.htm – search, sort, and browse adverbs and/or their frequency bigrams.htm – search, sort, and browse bigrams (two-word phrases) and/or their frequency entities.htm – search, sort, and browse named-entities, their type, and/or their frequency keywords.htm – search, sort, and browse keywords (statistically significant unigrams) and/or their frequency noun-verb.htm – search, sort, and browse noun/verb combinations by noun, verb, or frequency nouns.htm – search, sort, and browse nouns and/or their frequency pronouns.htm – search, sort, and browse pronouns and/or their frequency proper-nouns.htm – search, sort, and browse proper nouns and/or their frequency quadgrams.htm – search, sort, and browse quadgrams (four-word phrases) and/or their frequency questions.htm – search, sort, and browse questions (sentences ending with a question mark) and from which items they were extracted search.htm – a free text query interface based on the narrative summaries of each item in the corpus topic-model.htm – a topic modeler; a tool used to enumerate as well as compare & contrast latent themes in the corpus trigrams.htm – search, sort, and browse trigrams (three-word phrases) and/or their frequency unigrams.htm – search, sort, and browse unigrams (individual words) and/or their frequency verbs.htm – search, sort, and browse verbs and/or their frequencies index.htm – This HTML file narratively reports on the content of your study carrel. It is the best place to begin once you have downloaded and unzipped the carrel. MANIFEST.htm – This file, and it is the third best place to begin once you have downloaded and unzipped a carrel. job_1819387465.slurm – This file, or a very similarly named file, is the batch file used to initially create your study carrel. In the future, this file may be removed from the study carrel all together because it serves only an administrative purpose. js – This subdirectory includes a set of Javascript libraries supporting the functionality of index.htm as well as the HTML files in the htm directory. Because these files are here your computer does not need to be connected to the Internet in order to effectively read your carrel. Study carrels are designed to be stand-alone file systems usable for years to come. LICENSE – This is the license file; each study carrel is distributed under a GNU Public License. pos – This subdirectory contains a set of tab-delimited files, and each file contains a set of part-of-speech files from a given document in your corpus. While the files’ names end in .pos, they are plain text files that can be imported into for favorite spreadsheet, database, or analysis application. The files have six columns: 1) id, 2) sid, 3) tid, 4) token, 5) lemma, and 6) pos. The definitions of these columns are described in another blog posting. The definitions of these columns and possible uses of these files are described elsewhere, but in short, these files help answer question regarding who, what, how, how many, and actions as well as grammer and style. README – This file contains the very briefest of introductions to the carrel. standard-error.txt – As each study carrel is being created, error and status messages are output to this file. It is a log file. If the creation of your study carrel fails, then this is a good place to look for clues on what went wrong. Send me this file if you are stymied. standard-output.txt – After your study carrel as been created and distilled into a database, sets of queries are applied against the database. This file is the second best place to begin once you have downloaded and unzipped a carrel. tsv – Except for one (questions.tsv), this subdirectory contains a set of frequency tables in the form of tab-delimited text files. The exception is a tab-delimited text file too, but it is just not a frequency file. All of these files can be imported into for favorite spreadsheet, database, or analysis application. Possible uses for these files are destined to be outlined in future postings, but in short, perusal of these files will help you answer questions regarding your corpus’s “aboutness” as well as who, what, when, where, how, how many, and why questions. The structure of each file is listed below: adjective-noun.tsv – three columns: 1) adjective, 2) noun, and 3) frequency where frequency denotes the number of times the given adjective appears immediately before the given noun in the corpus adjectives.tsv – two columns: 1) adjective, and 2) frequency adverbs.tsv – two columns: 1) adverb, and 2) frequency bigrams.tsv – two columns: 1) bigram (two-word phrase), and 2) frequency entities.tsv – three columns: 1) entity, 2) type, and 3) frequency keywords.tsv – two columns: 1) keyword (statistically significant unigram), and 2) frequency noun-verb.tsv – three columns: 1) noun, 2) verb, and 3) a frequency where frequency denotes the number of times the given noun appears immediately before the given verb in the entire corpus nouns.tsv – two columns: 1) noun, and 2) frequency pronouns.tsv – two columns: 1) pronoun, and 2) frequency proper-nouns.tsv – two columns: 1) proper, and 2) frequency quadgrams.tsv – two columns: 1) quadgram (four-word phrase), and 2) frequency questions.tsv – two columns: 1) identifier, and 2) question where each question is a “sentence” ending in a question mark trigrams.tsv – two columns: 1) trigram (three-word phrase), and 2) frequency unigrams.tsv – two columns: 1) unigram (individual word), and 2) frequency verbs.tsv – two columns: 1) verb, and 2) frequency txt – This subdirectory contains plain text versions of the files stored in the cache directory. A plain text version of each & every item in the cache directory ought to exist in this directory. The contents of this directory is what was used to do the Reader’s analysis. The contents of this directory are excellent candidates for further analysis with tools such as concordances, indexers, or topic modelers. urls – This subdirectory contains a set of tab-delimited files, and each file contains a set of URLs from a given document in your corpus. While the files’ names end in .url, they are plain text files that can be imported into for favorite spreadsheet, database, or analysis application. The files have three columns: 1) id, 2) domain, and 3) url. The definitions of these columns and possible uses of these files are described elsewhere, but in short, these files help answer questions regarding document provenance and relationships as well as addressing the perenial issue of “finding more like this one”. wrd – This subdirectory contains a set of tab-delimited files, and each file contains a set of computed keywords from a given document in your corpus. While the files’ names end in .wrd, they are plain text files that can be imported into for favorite spreadsheet, database, or analysis application. The files have two columns: 1) id, and 2 keyword. The definitions of these columns and possible uses of these files are described elsewhere, but in short, these files help answer questions such as “What is this document about?” Links [1] Airivata – https://airavata.apache.org by Eric Lease Morgan at December 28, 2019 12:10 AM December 17, 2019 Life of a Librarian A Distant Reader Field Trip to Bloomington Yesterday I was in Bloomington (Indiana) for a Distant Reader field trip. More specifically, I met with Marlon Pierce and Team XSEDE to talk about Distant Reader next steps. We discussed the possibility of additional grant opportunities, possible ways to exploit the Airivata/Django front-end, and Distant Reader embellishments such as: Distant Reader Lite – a desktop version of the Reader which processes single files Distant Reader Extras – a suite of tools for managing collections of “study carrels” The Distant Reader Appliance – a stand-alone piece of hardware built with Raspberry Pi’s Along the way Marlon & I visited the data center where I actually laid hands on the Reader. We also visited John Walsh of the HathiTrust Research Center where I did a two-fold show & tell: 1) downloading HathiTrust plain text files as well as PDF documents using htid2books, and 2) the Distant Reader, of course. As a bonus, there was cool mobile hanging from the ceiling of Luddy Hall. “A good time was had by all.” by Eric Lease Morgan at December 17, 2019 09:00 PM November 09, 2019 Life of a Librarian What is the Distant Reader and why should I care? The Distant Reader is a tool for reading. [1] Wall Paper by Eric The Distant Reader takes an arbitrary amount of unstructured data (text) as input, and it outputs sets of structured data for analysis — reading. Given a corpus of any size, the Distant Reader will analyze the corpus, and it will output a myriad of reports enabling you to use & understand the corpus. The Distant Reader is intended to supplement the traditional reading process. The Distant Reader empowers one to use & understand large amounts of textual information both quickly & easily. For example, the Distant Reader can consume the entire issue of a scholarly journal, the complete works of a given author, or the content found at the other end of an arbitrarily long list of URLs. Thus, the Distant Reader is akin to a book’s table-of-contents or back-of-the-book index but at scale. It simplifies the process of identifying trends & anomalies in a corpus, and then it enables a person to further investigate those trends & anomalies. The Distant Reader is designed to “read” everything from a single item to a corpus of thousand’s of items. It is intended for the undergraduate student who wants to read the whole of their course work in a given class, the graduate student who needs to read hundreds (thousands) of items for their thesis or dissertation, the scientist who wants to review the literature, or the humanist who wants to characterize a genre. How it works The Distant Reader takes five different forms of input: a URL – good for blogs, single journal articles, or long reports a list of URLs – the most scalable, but creating the list can be problematic a file – good for that long PDF document on your computer a zip file – the zip file can contain just about any number of files from your computer a zip file plus a metadata file – with the metadata file, the reader’s analysis is more complete Once the input is provided, the Distant Reader creates a cache — a collection of all the desired content. This is done via the input or by crawling the ‘Net. Once the cache is collected, each & every document is transformed into plain text, and along the way basic bibliographic information is extracted. The next step is analysis against the plain text. This includes rudimentary counts & tabulations of ngrams, the computation of readability scores & keywords, basic topic modeling, parts-of-speech & named entity extraction, summarization, and the creation of a semantic index. All of these analyses are manifested as tab-delimited files and distilled into a single relational database file. After the analysis is complete, two reports are generated: 1) a simple plain text file which is very tabular, and 2) a set of HTML files which are more narrative and graphical. Finally, everything that has been accumulated & generated is compressed into a single zip file for downloading. This zip file is affectionately called a “study carrel“. It is completely self-contained and includes all of the data necessary for more in-depth analysis. What it does The Distant Reader supplements the traditional reading process. It does this in the way of traditional reading apparatus (tables of content, back-of-book indexes, page numbers, etc), but it does it more specifically and at scale. Put another way, the Distant Reader can answer a myriad of questions about individual items or the corpus as a whole. Such questions are not readily apparent through traditional reading. Examples include but are not limited to: How big is the corpus, and how does its size compare to other corpora? How difficult (scholarly) is the corpus? What words or phrases are used frequently and infrequently? What statistically significant words characterize the corpus? Are there latent themes in the corpus, and if so, then what are they and how do they change over both time and place? How do any latent themes compare to basic characteristics of each item in the corpus (author, genre, date, type, location, etc.)? What is discussed in the corpus (nouns)? What actions take place in the corpus (verbs)? How are those things and actions described (adjectives and adverbs)? What is the tone or “sentiment” of the corpus? How are the things represented by nouns, verbs, and adjective related? Who is mentioned in the corpus, how frequently, and where? What places are mentioned in the corpus, how frequently, and where? People who use the Distant Reader look at the reports it generates, and they often say, “That’s interesting!” This is because it highlights characteristics of the corpus which are not readily apparent. If you were asked what a particular corpus was about or what are the names of people mentioned in the corpus, then you might answer with a couple of sentences or a few names, but with the Distant Reader you would be able to be more thorough with your answer. The questions outlined above are not necessarily apropos to every student, researcher, or scholar, but the answers to many of these questions will lead to other, more specific questions. Many of those questions can be answered directly or indirectly through further analysis of the structured data provided in the study carrel. For example, each & every feature of each & every sentence of each & every item in the corpus has been saved in a relational database file. By querying the database, the student can extract every sentence with a given word or matching a given grammer to answer a question such as “How was the king described before & after the civil war?” or “How did this paper’s influence change over time?” A lot of natural language processing requires pre-processing, and the Distant Reader does this work automatically. For example, collections need to be created, and they need to be transformed into plain text. The text will then be evaluated in terms of parts-of-speech and named-entities. Analysis is then done on the results. This analysis may be as simple as the use of concordance or as complex as the application of machine learning. The Distant Reader “primes the pump” for this sort of work because all the raw data is already in the study carrel. The Distant Reader is not intended to be used alone. It is intended to be used in conjunction with other tools, everything from a plain text editor, to a spreadsheet, to database, to topic modelers, to classifiers, to visualization tools. Conclusion I don’t know about you, but now-a-days I can find plenty of scholarly & authoritative content. My problem is not one of discovery but instead one of comprehension. How do I make sense of all the content I find? The Distant Reader is intended to address this question by making observations against a corpus and providing tools for interpreting the results. Links [1] Distant Reader – https://distantreader.org by Eric Lease Morgan at November 09, 2019 02:25 AM November 06, 2019 Life of a Librarian Project Gutenberg and the Distant Reader The venerable Project Gutenberg is perfect fodder for the Distant Reader, and this essay outlines how & why. (tl;dnr: Search my mirror of Project Gutenberg, save the result as a list of URLs, and feed them to the Distant Reader.) Project Gutenberg Wall Paper by Eric A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, there was a man named Micheal Hart. Story has it he went to college at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne. He was there during a summer, and the weather was seasonably warm. On the other hand, the computer lab was cool. After all, computers run hot, and air conditioning is a must. To cool off, Micheal went into the computer lab to be in a cool space.† While he was there he decided to transcribe the United States Declaration of Independence, ultimately, in the hopes of enabling people to use a computers to “read” this and additional transcriptions. That was in 1971. One thing led to another, and Project Gutenberg was born. I learned this story while attending a presentation by the now late Mr. Hart on Saturday, February 27, 2010 in Roanoke (Indiana). As it happened it was also Mr. Hart’s birthday. [1] To date, Project Gutenberg is a corpus of more than 60,000 freely available transcribed ebooks. The texts are predominantly in English, but many languages are represented. Many academics look down on Project Gutenberg, probably because it is not as scholarly as they desire, or maybe because the provenance of the materials is in dispute. Despite these things, Project Gutenberg is a wonderful resource, especially for high school students, college students, or life-long learners. Moreover, its transcribed nature eliminates any problems of optical character recognition, such as one encounters with the HathiTrust. The content of Project Gutenberg is all but perfectly formatted for distant reading. Unfortunately, the interface to Project Gutenberg is less than desirable; the index to Project Gutenberg is limited to author, title, and “category” values. The interface does not support free text searching, and there is limited support for fielded searching and Boolean logic. Similarly, the search results are not very interactive nor faceted. Nor is there any application programmer interface to the index. With so much “clean” data, so much more could be implemented. In order to demonstrate the power of distant reading, I endeavored to create a mirror of Project Gutenberg while enhancing the user interface. To create a mirror of Project Gutenberg, I first downloaded a set of RDF files describing the collection. [2] I then wrote a suite of software which parses the RDF, updates a database of desired content, loops through the database, caches the content locally, indexes it, and provides a search interface to the index. [3, 4] The resulting interface is ill-documented but 100% functional. It supports free text searching, phrase searching, fielded searching (author, title, subject, classification code, language) and Boolean logic (using AND, OR, or NOT). Search results are faceted enabling the reader to refine their query sans a complicated query syntax. Because the cached content includes only English language materials, the index is only 33,000 items in size. Project Gutenberg & the Distant Reader The Distant Reader is a tool for reading. It takes an arbitrary amount of unstructured data (text) as input, and it outputs sets of structured data for analysis — reading. Given a corpus of any size, the Distant Reader will analyze the corpus, and it will output a myriad of reports enabling you to use & understand the corpus. The Distant Reader is intended to supplement the traditional reading process. Project Gutenberg and the Distant Reader can be used hand-in-hand. As described in a previous posting, the Distant Reader can take five different types of input. [5] One of those inputs is a file where each line in the file is a URL. My locally implemented mirror of Project Gutenberg enables the reader to search & browse in a manner similar to the canonical version of Project Gutenberg, but with two exceptions. First & foremost, once a search has been gone against my mirror, one of the resulting links is “only local URLs”. For example, below is an illustration of the query “love AND honor AND truth AND justice AND beauty”, and the “only local URLs” link is highlighted: Search result By selecting the “only local URLs”, a list of… URLs is returned, like this: URLs This list of URLs can then be saved as file, and any number of things can be done with the file. For example, there are Google Chrome extensions for the purposes of mass downloading. The file of URLs can be fed to command-line utilities (ie. curl or wget) also for the purposes of mass downloading. In fact, assuming the file of URLs is named love.txt, the following command will download the files in parallel and really fast: cat love.txt | parallel wget This same file of URLs can be used as input against the Distant Reader, and the result will be a “study carrel” where the whole corpus could be analyzed — read. For example, the Reader will extract all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives from the corpus. Thus you will be able to answer what and how questions. It will pull out named entities and enable you to answer who and where questions. The Reader will extract keywords and themes from the corpus, thus outlining the aboutness of your corpus. From the results of the Reader you will be set up for concordancing and machine learning (such as topic modeling or classification) thus enabling you to search for more narrow topics or “find more like this one”. The search for love, etc returned more than 8000 items. Just less than 500 of them were returned in the search result, and the Reader empowers you to read all 500 of them at one go. Summary Project Gutenberg is very useful resource because the content is: 1) free, and 2) transcribed. Mirroring Project Gutenberg is not difficult, and by doing so an interface to it can be enhanced. Project Gutenberg items are perfect items for reading & analysis by the Distant Reader. Search Project Gutenberg, save the results as a file, feed the file to the Reader and… read the results at scale. Notes and links † All puns are intended. [1] Michael Hart in Roanoke (Indiana) – video: https://youtu.be/eeoBbSN9Esg; blog posting: http://infomotions.com/blog/2010/03/michael-hart-in-roanoke-indiana/ [2] The various Project Gutenberg feeds, including the RDF is located at https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds [3] The suite of software to cache and index Project Gutenberg is available on GitHub at https://github.com/ericleasemorgan/gutenberg-index [4] My full text index to the English language texts in Project Gutenberg is available at http://dh.crc.nd.edu/sandbox/gutenberg/cgi-bin/search.cgi [5] The Distant Reader and its five different types of input – http://sites.nd.edu/emorgan/2019/10/dr-inputs/ by Eric Lease Morgan at November 06, 2019 01:56 AM October 26, 2019 Life of a Librarian OJS Toolbox Given a Open Journal System (OJS) root URL and an authorization token, cache all JSON files associated with the given OJS title, and optionally output rudimentary bibliographics in the form of a tab-separated value (TSV) stream. [0] Wall Paper by Eric OJS is a journal publishing system. [1] Is supports a REST-ful API allowing the developer to read & write to the System’s underlying database. [2] This hack — the OJS Toolbox — merely caches & reads the metadata associated with the published issues of a given journal title. The Toolbox is written in Bash. To cache the metadata, you will need to have additional software as part of your file system: curl and jq. [3, 4] Curl is used to interact with the API. Jq is used to read & parse the resulting JSON streams. When & if you want to transform the cached JSON files into rudimentary bibliographics, then you will also need to install GNU Parallel, a tool which makes parallel processing trivial. [5] Besides the software, you will need three pieces of information. The first is the root URL of the OJS system/title you wish to use. This value will probably look something like this –> https://example.com/index.php/foo Ask the OJS systems administrator regarding the details. The second piece of information is an authorization token. If an “api secret” has been created by the local OJS systems administrator, then each person with an OJS account ought to have been granted a token. Again, ask the OJS systems administrator for details. The third piece of information is the name of a directory where your metadata will be cached. For the sake of an example, assume the necessary values are: root URL – https://example.com/index.php/foo token – xyzzy directory – bar Once you have gotten this far, you can cache the totality of the issue metadata: $ ./bin/harvest.sh https://example.com/index.php/foo xyzzy bar More specifically, `harvest.sh` will create a directory called bar. It will then determine how many issues exist in the title foo. It will then harvest sets of issue data, parse each set into individual issue files, and save the result as JSON files in the bar directory. You now have a “database” containing all the bibliographic information of a given title For my purposes, I need a TSV file with four columns: 1) author, 2) title, 3) date, and 4) url. Such is the purpose of `issues2tsv.sh` and `issue2tsv.sh`. The first script, `issues2tsv.sh`, takes a directory as input. It then outputs a simple header, finds all the JSON files in the given directory, and passes them along (in parallel) to `issue2tsv.sh` which does the actual work. Thus, to create my TSV file, I submit a command like this: $ ./bin/issues2tsv.sh bar > ./bar.tsv The resulting file (bar.tsv) looks something like this: author title date url Kilgour The Catalog 1972-09-01 https://example.com/index.php/foo/article/download/5738/5119 McGee Two Designs 1972-09-01 https://example.com/index.php/foo/article/download/5739/5120 Saracevic Book Reviews 1972-09-01 https://example.com/index.php/foo/article/download/5740/5121 Give such a file, I can easily download the content of a given article, extract any of its plain text, perform various natural language processing tasks against it, text mine the whole, full text index the whole, apply various bits of machine learning against the whole, and in general, “read” the totality of the journal. See The Distant Reader for details. [6] Links [0] OJS Toolbox – https://github.com/ericleasemorgan/ojs-toolbox [1] OJS – https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/ [2] OJS API – https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/dev/api/ojs/3.1 [3] curl – https://curl.haxx.se [4] jq – https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ [5] GNU Parallel – https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/ [6] Distant Reader – https://distantreader.org by Eric Lease Morgan at October 26, 2019 08:48 PM October 19, 2019 Life of a Librarian The Distant Reader and its five different types of input The Distant Reader can take five different types of input, and this blog posting describes what they are. Wall Paper by Eric The Distant Reader is a tool for reading. It takes an arbitrary amount of unstructured data (text) as input, and it outputs sets of structured data for analysis — reading. Given a corpus of any size, the Distant Reader will analyze the corpus, and it will output a myriad of reports enabling you to use & understand the corpus. The Distant Reader is intended to designed the traditional reading process. At the present time, the Reader can accept five different types of input, and they include: a file a URL a list of URLs a zip file a zip file with a companion CSV file Each of these different types of input are elaborated upon below. A file The simplest form of input is a single file from your computer. This can be just about file available to you, but to make sense, the file needs to contain textual data. Thus, the file can be a Word document, a PDF file, an Excel spreadsheet, an HTML file, a plain text file, etc. A file in the form of an image will not work because it contains zero text. Also, not all PDF files are created equal. Some PDF files are only facsimiles of their originals. Such PDF files are merely sets of images concatenated together. In order for PDF files to be used as input, the PDF files need to have been “born digitally” or they need to have had optical character recognition previously applied against them. Most PDF files are born digitally nor do they suffer from being facsimiles. A good set of use-cases for single file input is the whole of a book, a long report, or maybe a journal article. Submitting a single file to the Distant Reader is quick & easy, but the Reader is designed for analyzing larger rather than small corpora. Thus, supplying a single journal article to the Reader doesn’t make much sense; the use of the traditional reading process probably makes more sense for a single journal article. A URL The Distant Reader can take a single URL as input. Given a URL, the Reader will turn into a rudimentary Internet spider and build a corpus. More specifically, given a URL, the Reader will: retrieve & cache the content found at the other end of the URL extract any URLs it finds in the content retrieve & cache the content from these additional URLs stop building the corpus but continue with its analysis In short, given a URL, the Reader will cache the URL’s content, crawl the URL one level deep, cache the result, and stop caching. Like the single file approach, submitting a URL to the Distant Reader is quick & easy, but there are a number of caveats. First of all, the Reader does not come with very many permissions, and just because you are authorized to read the content at the other end of a URL does not mean the Reader has the same authorization. A lot of content on the Web resides behind paywalls and firewalls. The Reader can only cache 100% freely accessible content. “Landing pages” and “splash pages” represent additional caveats. Many of the URLs passed around the ‘Net do not point to the content itself, but instead they point to ill-structured pages describing the content — metadata pages. Such pages may include things like authors, titles, and dates, but these things are not presented in a consistent nor computer-readable fashion; they are laid out with aesthetics or graphic design in mind. These pages do contain pointers to the content you want to read, but the content may be two or three more clicks away. Be wary of URLs pointing to landing pages or splash pages. Another caveat to this approach is the existence of extraneous input due to navigation. Many Web pages include links for navigating around the site. They also include links to things like “contact us” and “about this site”. Again, the Reader is sort of stupid. If found, the Reader will crawl such links and include their content in the resulting corpus. Despite these drawbacks there are number of excellent use-cases for single URL input. One of the best is Wikipedia articles. Feed the Reader a URL pointing to a Wikipedia article. The Reader will cache the article itself, and then extract all the URLs the article uses as citations. The Reader will then cache the content of the citations, and then stop caching. Similarly, a URL pointing to an open access journal article will function just like the Wikipedia article, and this will be even more fruitful if the citations are in the form of freely accessible URLs. Better yet, consider pointing the Reader to the root of an open access journal issue. If the site is not overly full of navigation links, and if the URLs to the content itself are not buried, then the whole of the issue will be harvested and analyzed. Another good use-case is the home page of some sort of institution or organization. Want to know about Apple Computer, the White House, a conference, or a particular department of a university? Feed the root URL of any of these things to the Reader, and you will learn something. At the very least, you will learn how the organization prioritizes its public face. If things are more transparent than not, then you might be able to glean the names and addresses of the people in the organization, the public policies of the organization, or the breadth & depth of the organization. Yet another excellent use-case includes blogs. Blogs often contain content at their root. Navigations links abound, but more often than not the navigation links point to more content. If the blog is well-designed, then the Reader may be able to create a corpus from the whole thing, and you can “read” it in one go. A list of URLs The third type of input is a list of URLs. The list is expected to be manifested as a plain text file, and each line in the file is a URL. Use whatever application you desire to build the list, but save the result as a .txt file, and you will probably have a plain text file.‡ Caveats? Like the single URL approach, the list of URLs must point to freely available content, and pointing to landing pages or splash pages is probably to be avoided. Unlike the single URL approach, the URLs in the list will not be used as starting points for Web crawling. Thus, if the list contains ten items, then ten items will be cached for analysis. Another caveat is the actual process of creating the list; I have learned that is actually quite difficult to create lists of URLs. Copying & pasting gets old quickly. Navigating a site and right-clicking on URLs is tedious. While search engines & indexes often provide some sort of output in list format, the lists are poorly structured and not readily amenable to URL extraction. On the other hand, there are more than a few URL extraction tools. I use a Google Chrome extension called Link Grabber. [1] Install Link Grabber. Use Chrome to visit a site. Click the Link Grabber button, and all the links in the document will be revealed. Copy the links and paste them into a document. Repeat until you get tired. Sort and peruse the list of links. Remove the ones you don’t want. Save the result as a plain text file.‡ Feed the result to the Reader. Despite these caveats, the list of URLs approach is enormously scalable; the list of URLs approach is the most scalable input option. Given a list of five or six items, the Reader will do quite well, but the Reader will operate just as well if the list contains dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of URLs. Imagine reading the complete works of your favorite author or the complete run of an electronic journal. Such is more than possible with the Distant Reader.‡ A zip file The Distant Reader can take a zip file as input. Create a folder/directory on your computer. Copy just about any file into the folder/directory. Compress the file into a .zip file. Submit the result to the Reader. Like the other approaches, there are a few caveats. First of all, the Reader is not able to accept .zip files whose size is greater than 64 megabytes. While we do it all the time, the World Wide Web was not really designed to push around files of any great size, and 64 megabytes is/was considered plenty. Besides, you will be surprised how many files can fit in a 64 megabyte file. Second, the computer gods never intended file names to contain things other than simple Romanesque letters and a few rudimentary characters. Now-a-days our file names contain spaces, quote marks, apostrophes, question marks, back slashes, forward slashes, colons, commas, etc. Moreover, file names might be 64 characters long or longer! While every effort as been made to accomodate file names with such characters, your milage may vary. Instead, consider using file names which are shorter, simpler, and have some sort of structure. An example might be first word of author’s last name, first meaningful word of title, year (optional), and extension. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick might thus be named melville-moby.txt. In the end the Reader will be less confused, and you will be more able to find things on your computer. There are a few advantages to the zip file approach. First, you can circumvent authorization restrictions; you can put licensed content into your zip files and it will be analyzed just like any other content. Second, the zip file approach affords you the opportunity to pre-process your data. For example, suppose you have downloaded a set of PDF files, and each page includes some sort of header or footer. You could transform each of these PDF files into plain text, use some sort of find/replace function to remove the headers & footers. Save the result, zip it up, and submit it to the Reader. The resulting analysis will be more accurate. There are many use-cases for the zip file approach. Masters and Ph.D students are expected to read large amounts of material. Save all those things into a folder, zip them up, and feed them to the Reader. You have been given a set of slide decks from a conference. Zip them up and feed them to the Reader. A student is expected to read many different things for History 101. Download them all, put them in a folder, zip them up, and submit them to the Distant Reader. You have written many things but they are not on the Web. Copy them to a folder, zip them up, and “read” them with the… Reader. A zip file with a companion CSV file The final form of input is a zip file with a companion comma-separated value (CSV) file — a metadata file. As the size of your corpus increases, so does the need for context. This context can often be manifested as metadata (authors, titles, dates, subject, genre, formats, etc.). For example, you might want to compare & contrast who wrote what. You will probably want to observe themes over space & time. You might want to see how things differ between different types of documents. To do this sort of analysis you will need to know metadata regarding your corpus. As outlined above, the Distant Reader first creates a cache of content — a corpus. This is the raw data. In order to do any analysis against the corpus, the corpus must be transformed into plain text. A program called Tika is used to do this work. [2] Not only does Tika transform just about any file into plain text, but it also does its best to extract metadata. Depending on many factors, this metadata may include names of authors, titles of documents, dates of creation, number of pages, MIME-type, language, etc. Unfortunately, more often than not, this metadata extraction process fails and the metadata is inaccurate, incomplete, or simply non-existent. This is where the CSV file comes in; by including a CSV file named “metadata.csv” in the .zip file, the Distant Reader will be able to provide meaningful context. In turn, you will be able to make more informed observations, and thus your analysis will be more thorough. Here’s how: assemble a set of files for analysis use your favorite spreadsheet or database application to create a list of the file names assign a header to the list (column) and call it “file” create one or more columns whose headers are “author” and/or “title” and/or “date” to the best of your ability, update the list with author, title, or date values for each file save the result as a CSV file named “metadata.csv” and put it in the folder/directory to be zipped compress the folder/directory to create the zip file submit the result to the Distant Reader for analysis The zip file with a companion CSV file has all the strengths & weakness of the plain o’ zip file, but it adds some more. On the weakness side, creating a CSV file can be both tedious and daunting. On the other hand, many search engines & index export lists with author, title, and data metadata. One can use these lists as the starting point for the CSV file.♱ On the strength side, the addition of the CSV metadata file makes the Distant Reader’s output immeasurably more useful, and it leads the way to additional compare & contrast opportunities. Summary To date, the Distant Reader takes five different types of input. Each type has its own set of strengths & weaknesses: a file – good for a single large file; quick & easy; not scalable a URL – good for getting an overview of a single Web page and its immediate children; can include a lot of noise; has authorization limitations a list of URLs – can accomodate thousands of items; has authorization limitations; somewhat difficult to create list a zip file – easy to create; file names may get in the way; no authorization necessary; limited to 64 megabytes in size a zip file with CSV file – same as above; difficult to create metadata; results in much more meaningful reports & opportunities Happy reading! Notes & links ‡ Distant Reader Bounty #1: To date, I have only tested plain text files using line-feed characters as delimiters, such are the format of plain text files in the Linux and Macintosh worlds. I will pay $10 to the first person who creates a plain text file of URLs delimited by carriage-return/line-feed characters (the format of Windows-based text files) and who demonstrates that such files break the Reader. “On you mark. Get set. Go!” ‡ Distant Reader Bounty #2: I will pay $20 to the first person who creates a list of 2,000 URLs and feeds it to the Reader. ♱ Distant Reader Bounty #3: I will pay $30 to the first person who writes a cross-platform application/script which successfully transforms a Zotero bibliography into a Distant Reader CSV metadata file. [1] Link Grabber – http://bit.ly/2mgTKsp [2] Tika – http://tika.apache.org by Eric Lease Morgan at October 19, 2019 12:29 AM Date created: 2000-05-19 Date updated: 2011-05-03 URL: http://infomotions.com/