Choose five texts from Project Gutenberg. Visualize them using Voyant, and experiment with various views and settings. (You may find this guide helpful.) Write a paragraph or two about what you did, what you found out about the texts, and what you couldn’t find out this way.
Further reading
Critiques of text analysis
Baker, Paul, and Erez Levon. “Picking the Right Cherries? A Comparison of Corpus-Based and Qualitative Analyses of News Articles about Masculinity.” Discourse & Communication 9, no. 2 (April 2015): 221–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481314568542.
Berry, David. “The Computational Turn: Thinking about the Digital Humanities.” Culture Machine 12 (February 18, 2011): 1–22.
Bode, Katherine. “The Equivalence of ‘Close’ And ‘Distant’ Reading; Or, toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History.” Modern Language Quarterly 78, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 77–106. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-3699787.
Da, Nan Z. “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies.” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 3 (March 2019): 601–39. https://doi.org/10.1086/702594.
Dinsman, Melissa, and Alex Galloway. “The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Alexander Galloway.” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 27, 2016. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-digital-in-the-humanities-an-interview-with-alexander-galloway/.
Duncan Baretta, Silvio R., John Markoff, and Gilbert Shapiro. “The Selective Transmission of Historical Documents: The Case of the Parish Cahiers of 1789.” Histoire & Mesure 2, no. 3 (1987): 115–72. https://doi.org/10.3406/hism.1987.1328.
Eyers, Tom. “The Perils of the ‘Digital Humanities’: New Positivisms and the Fate of Literary Theory.” Postmodern Culture 23, no. 2 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2013.0038.
Fish, Stanley E. “What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?-Part II.” Boundary 2 8, no. 1 (1979): 129–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/303144.
Pechenick, Eitan Adam, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds. “Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution.” PLOS ONE 10, no. 10 (October 7, 2015): e0137041. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137041.
Pettit, Michael. “Historical Time in the Age of Big Data: Cultural Psychology, Historical Change, and the Google Books Ngram Viewer.” History of Psychology 19, no. 2 (2016): 141–53. https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000023.
Putnam, Lara. “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They CastThe Transnational and the Text-Searchable.” The American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (April 1, 2016): 377–402. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.377.
Stubbs, M. “Texts, Corpora, and Problems of Interpretation: A Response to Widdowson.” Applied Linguistics 22, no. 2 (June 1, 2001): 149–72. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/22.2.149.
Swafford, Annie. “Problems with the Syuzhet Package.” Anglophile in Academia: Annie Swafford’s Blog (blog), March 2, 2015. https://annieswafford.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/syuzhet/.
Tenen, Dennis Yi. “Toward a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space.” New Literary History 49, no. 1 (April 20, 2018): 119–47. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2018.0005.
Weingart, Scott. “Liveblogged Review of Macroanalysis by Matthew L. Jockers, Part 2.” the scottbot irregular, April 15, 2013. http://www.scottbot.net/HIAL/?p=34775.
Widdowson, H. G. “On the Limitations of Linguistics Applied.” Applied Linguistics 21, no. 1 (March 1, 2000): 3–25. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/21.1.3.
On web design
There are just too many books and resources on this topic for me to attempt to winnow them down. However, at a quick glance, this list of books looks pretty solid. Don’t forget that UCLA people have access to an extensive library of ebooks on technical topics.