Distant Reading of our Posts

Data mining, which is a form of distant reading, is how we are able to do more research with large pieces of text. To practice this, we plugged all of our blog posts into Voyant and Google Ngram. We started by looking at our most used words: 'share', 'literature', 'games', and 'player' as seen in the picture below.

'Share', being our most used word, was actually invalid because there are share options for each post. So, we are focusing on 'literature', 'games', and 'player'. The following picture shows how often and when the words were used over the course of all posts. As shown, 'player' and 'game' peaked when we were on the topic of video games while literature has been fairly stable across all posts.

Finally, when plugging these three words into Ngram, we can see that 'literature' was the most used word with the lines never crossing. This was surprising to me, seeing how video games and games in general are peaking in this time period, but it seems that literature is still more common and maybe even more important.