Project Spring Fling
digital humanities for assessment @ auraria library
3.5. Consistency with Voyant
The final micro-tool I wanted to experiment with in Voyant was Bubblelines. Bubblelines relate frequency but also consistency. They show where and how often these words occur in a corpus. For instance, with these student responses, there were a few times where the word “study” appeared multiple times close together--hence, the spots with bigger bubbles. I decided to create Bubblelines of the top 10 words that appear in the corpus. I also chose to separate them for readability.
Before creating and viewing the Bubblelines, I already knew what what the most-used words were in these responses. I wasn’t looking for that information. Instead, I was more interested if these words appeared consistently throughout the corpus. For the most part, they did. “Study” appeared throughout the responses with a few larger groupings here and there. Those larger bubbles are fairly spread out, though, meaning that the term wasn’t just in a ot of responses at one point and then never showed up again. This consistency is expected with frequent words like “study.” All 10 of these words were consistent across the corpus, some more so than others. For example, “research” has a couple of larger bubbles at the beginning and smaller ones near the end, as does “online.”
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There is caveat to the Bubblelines tool for this particular corpus. I couldn’t necessarily count on these bubbles to give me exact data because the students’ responses were transcribed randomly and anonymously. There is no way to track consistency in terms of days--that is, tracking whether the word “study” appeared throughout day one and day two of Spring Fling. Even without the order, though, the Bubblelines still give some insight into the importance of the topics associated with these words. If the words were used frequently and consistently, then the students most likely consider those words and ideas of high importance.