Doing Digital Humanities

Looking back at this digital humanties project that I completed at the end of my first semester in graduate school has proved a positive but at times challenging learning experience.

I used the Watergate Special Prosecution Force Transcripts from the years 1971 to 1973. Imported the transcribed PDFs into Voyant 2.4.

During my initial take at this project, I thought that it would be a simple idea of just importing the transcript PDFs and see what I get as an output.

As I used the Voyant tool more, I realized two important lessons:
1. I needed to rename the PDFs so that I can understand what day the transcript is referring to so that historians can use this to analyze what was talked about in the Nixon Oval Office about Watergate
2. I needed to use more visualizations besides the initial default ones to better understand what the corpus was telling me
3. I need edto figure out a plan to look at the sources because looking at 85 documents simultaneously was difficult to get a meaningful interpretation of it. By breaking it up by the years provided an opportunity to not only use various graphs but also analyze what happened between each year and throughout all three years.

Although I received some feedback that was useful, but some of it was not as helpful as I would’ve liked. I would’ve like a little bit more guidance to help me hone in on my project, make sure that I was on the right track, and to offer anymore advice as to where I can improve. I had some problems with my project in terms of not being sure if what I was doing was correct or if what I was analyzing was the right information I should be focused on. I tried to state what each graph did as well as provide a link to the Voyant guide as a reference but for me it was the uncertainly of if I was doing the sources justice to feel as though I was completing the project successfully.

I tried to highlight the various graphs that can be used to analyze the transcripts and about how to interact with the data as an end user to obtain the information that you wish to pursue.

All I can say is that I tried my best to analyze the sources using various graphs and I hope that my readers will take what I have done as a stepping stone for their work and improve on it.