3.1. Comparison with SameDiff (DataBasic)

I decided to use SameDiff first just to get a basic comparison. At the beginning of this tutorial project, we crowdsourced ideas from the department about what first-year students need to know. I then wanted to see how the librarians' ideas compared to the student ideas. SameDiff allows comparison between two texts, so I uploaded the two files to see what would happen.

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I first noticed that SameDiff warned me about this comparison because of the extreme length difference in these two texts. The transcription file has about 2700 words while the librarian suggestions are about 200. Even with this wide margin of difference, the tool still highlighted some interesting comparisons. For instance, it’s easy to see that the librarians thought first-year students needed to have certain information literacy skills as well as basic knowledge. Words like “argument,” “keywords,” and “inquiry” were used only in this text. On the other hand, students care much more about services. They used words like “printing,” “cafe,” and “textbooks” as part of first-year knowledge. I was also surprised at some of the overlapping words between librarians and students. Both talked about research and access to resources. They also both mentioned primary and scholarly, two words that I was sure would only be in the librarians' suggestions.