For Thursday, first head over to gutenberg.org and find a text you’re interested in analyzing. The text should be fairly long, i.e. try a novel or a collection of short stories, etc. Pro tip: download the text as a .txt file.
Next, go to Voyant Tools. This is a free, open source suite of text analysis tools. Before you start using the various tools, look at the tutorial on “Getting Started.” Also, take a look at the “Tools Index“; this will give you a sense of the kinds of things you can do to your selected text. (You can also watch short video tutorials of particular tools and how to employ them.) I highly recommend that you check out Alexis Priestley’s essay on using Voyant – – it’s a great, concrete example of how to do computational text analysis and how to think about its results.
Once you’ve familiarized yourself a bit with Voyant, upload your selected text and let the games begin!