Digging into the Stuff: Coursepack for Material Culture

Been doing all sorts of crazy things with the main texts I’ll be using in my SOCI/ANTH 441 Material Culture course.

(Not sure how well these things will appear.)

One of those things is text-/wordmining. Not only looking at cited references (who cites whom, what texts could be complementary), but also looking concordance and such (how frequently certain words appear in those texts).

Here’s an example:

Clusters of collocate terms in Material Culture coursepack.
Clusters of collocate terms in Material Culture coursepack. – Made with Voyant-Tools.org

(This collocate cluster tool in action here.)

Also, using all sorts of terms related to material culture, specifically:

Collapsed version of the word trends related to material culture, in coursepack texts for SOCI/ANTH 441 Material Culture.
Collapsed version of the word trends related to material culture, in coursepack texts for SOCI/ANTH 441 Material Culture. – Made with Voyant-Tools.org
List of terms related to material culture, by frequency.
List of terms related to material culture, by frequency. – Made with Voyant-Tools.org

Collapsed version of the word trends related to material culture, in coursepack texts for SOCI/ANTH 441 Material Culture.
Collapsed version of the word trends related to material culture, in coursepack texts for SOCI/ANTH 441 Material Culture. – Made with Voyant-Tools.org
Separate trends for words related to material culture, as found in texts for the SOCI/ANTH 441 Material Culture coursepack.
Separate trends for words related to material culture, as found in texts for the SOCI/ANTH 441 Material Culture coursepack. – Made with Voyant-Tools.org

 



































































Even just the “distinctive terms” of each text are interesting:


Terms differentiating coursepack texts.
Terms differentiating coursepack texts. Made with Voyant-Tools.org

(That corpus is found here.)



And, obviously, the obligatory word cloud…

Wordcloud of coursepack terms
Wordcloud for the Coursepack content in SOCI/ANTH 441 – Made with Voyant-Tools.org


See this wordcloud in action here.