Activities for Voyant

1. Cirrus - What do we learn about the text from this Word Cloud?

Let’s spend some time exploring:

• What happens when you hover your mouse over different parts of the Cirrus widget?
• What happens when you click on a word?
• What hidden buttons can you find?
• Find the “Options” button and edit or view the list of “Stopwords.” Does this change your results?

1. Trends: an efficient corpus reader that fetches segments of text as you scroll

• How are words in the “trends” widget chosen for inclusion?
• What kind of information to the trend lines, x- and y- axes convey?
• What does the graph tell us about the story?
• Bonus Question: What is the difference between relative and raw frequencies and how do you find that information?

Activities for NLTK

1. Select any paragraph of text and: a. tokenize by sentence b. tokenize by word c. identify all stop words

2. Plot a frequency distribution of the words in your selected text. Change the number of words included in the distribution.

3. Explore the Reuters corpus. Identify the five most frequently occurring categories?

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