Assignment 1
This assignment can be done alone or in pairs (due between 7 and 27 Oct). The target number of words is 1250-1500, plus visuals.
The assignment builds on the presentation you did in class where a number of corpora were downloaded for you and included in the class drive.
Guidelines:
-Use one of the already downloaded corpora from AntCorGen or follow the steps to download AntCorGen described in the video linked to the syllabus to download your own. NB: If you try to download too many articles at once, it will not work. I would recommend somewhere in the range of 200-500. If you use something other than the already downloaded corpora, make a file in the shared drive and include your files, labelling the folder with your group name.
-Use AntConc to analyze the corpus that you have created. What are the most common words? specialized words? clusters? collocations? How do the words found in these articles compared with respect to a reference corpus (keyword)?
-Feel free to use Antconc or Voyant tools for your analysis, but be aware that it is more difficult to use Voyant with many documents at a time. AntConc is particularly designed to deal with many files such as the corpora downloaded from AntCorGen. If you find a subset of particularly interesting articles (say 10 or so), you can use Voyant to analyze them. If you use a subset, provide a list of the file names.
If you do this assignment in pairs, then you can submit one web-based write-up, pointing to the link from your colleague's page. Since in group work there is a "division of labor" and different insights from both parties, please include a few sentences describing what your unique contribution to the write-up was.
Guiding questions:
What was your knowledge of the subject heading into the assignment? Did you have any expectations or hypotheses about what you might find in the language of the subject?
Are there groups of articles with common trends? Did your results match your hypotheses?
What surprises came up along the way? Did you have unexpected results?
How do your results change if you look at different parts of the articles (abstract, conclusions, etc) or the full text?
How do you think that the open access nature of the journals contributes to your findings? You might look into the publishing FAQ at PLOS to investigate the source.
How might you use this workflow in other courses you take, working on assignments in other disciplines, or even for preparing for your capstone?
The rubric for assignments can be found here.