Preliminary Class Business

• No office hours today.  (Instructor is giving a lecture at 4 pm in SSMS 2135 on "Key Trends in the Digital Humanities: How the Digital Humanities Challenge the Idea of the Humanities")

• Course shared Google account and Google Drive space.

1. Deciding on a Corpus For Our Class Project

• Following up on ideas discussed in our last class:
• Eve, Lindsay, Alec, Ashley: Further thoughts about the 19th-century British novels corpus?
  (Spreadsheet of the corpus: metadata.xls) -- Also: we could customize a collection from Project Gutenberg's "Bookshelf" categories.
• Jennifer: "I" in the corpus?
• Maithy, Sinead: children's books?
• Ginny: translations?
• Also use the Project Gutenberg "modern" corpus we now have?

2. Research Question

• Main research question?
• Subordinate or related research questions?

3. Analytical Methods (and Tools)

• Vocabulary frequency analysis
• Collocation analysis 
• Topic modeling
• Social network analysis

4. Initial Tasks and Project Team Organization

• [TBD]

Initial Plans:

• Corpus: 19thC. Children's fiction (compared to 19thC. novels, and possibly selective contemporary children's fiction)
• Possibly segment the study by chronological era.
• Task 1: finalize list of children's fiction: (Lindsay, Aaron)
• Task 2: select a few contemporary works of children's fiction: (Ashley & Jennifer)
• Task 3: history of children's fiction (Ginny, Maithy, Sinead)
• Task 4: organize chronological scope of the study (Alec)
• Task 5: looking for research question.
• Possibilities: pronouns, gender differences (authors, characters), vocabulary
• Task 6: set up Google Drive space and PBWorks in organized way; scripts for segmenting texts