Data Visualization tools allow users to analyze a text by taking statistical data – such as word frequency, the amount of times a certain word or phrase appears in a text, and create a “word cloud” or image of the most frequently used words that appear.
Other Data Visualization tools such as “SameDiff” from databasic.io, a company creating data visualization tools aimed learning, compare the word frequency between two documents to show the similarities and differences in order to find common themes or to investigate why certain words and phrases appear in one text and not another.
I generated “word clouds” of the 5 chapters of The Education of Henry Adams that were titled after cities he had lived in: Boston, Washington, Berlin, Rome, and Chicago. I found images of famous historical sites for each individual city and then used the popular “word cloud” generator Tagxedo over another popular option Wordle because Tagxedo allows the user to upload their own images and have the most frequently used words appear in the relief.
For Boston I chose the Massachusetts State House courtesy of Jp16103 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44992576
For Washington I chose the White House courtesy of Rob Young from United Kingdom (The White House) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
For Berlin I chose the Brandenburger Tor courtesy of By Thomas Wolf, www.foto-tw.de, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5059290
For Rome I chose the Fontana di Trevi courtesy of By Livioandronico2013 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45365468
For Chicago I chose the Willis Tower courtesy of By Photo taken in 1998 by Wikipedia user Soakologist. No rights claimed or reserved. – From enwiki., Copyrighted free use, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=784660
Using the SameDiff tool I was able to generate a list of the most used words in the “Berlin” chapter of the Education of Henry Adams as well as the “Rome” chapter. The tool then generates of third list of the words that were most commonly found in both chapters. When teaching a class, you can engage students by asking them to understand why “Garibaldi” shows up so much in the Rome chapter and not at all in the Berlin chapter or why the German city Dresden in mentioned in the chapter about Rome and not at all in the chapter about the German city of Berlin.
Data Visualization tools are a free, fun, and engaging way to get students to think more analytically about texts while still allowing for creativity.