Text Analysis: Hows and Whys

A comment on another proposal mentions algorithmic text analysis. I would love a session focused on how people are taking advantage of digital tools to deal with particularly textual information and questions of textual (or even literary) analysis. This could include tools like Voyant, approaches like topic modeling (with software like MALLET), or using a language like Python (with a package like NLTK) to manipulate text in other ways. (Indeed, I’d be just as interested to learn about other things that I’ve never heard of!) And, as I hope my title suggests, just as interesting as questions of what software to use, and how to use it, are questions of why folks are doing such analysis. What sorts of questions can we ask?

If there is a critical mass of interest in these sorts of questions, we could have a couple sessions focused on different technologies—one on topic models, one on Python and NLTK (for instance), et cetera.