crissyshan
commented
4 years ago Hey, my group also discussed the possibility of using topic modeling! Especially since it feels so hard to come up proper themes/topics to track by hand when we ourselves don't even know the most common words in all the songs (since we can't read all these songs and keep track of that kind of frequency data in our little human brains), topic modeling is very tempting to us! I'd love to see if you guys move forward with this. I know my group found some very primitive topic modeling tools online that would be able to help us with our corpus, if you guys are interested in what we found! I really like your idea about the American West. I would be very interesting to see if there are songs referencing the native population from the Trail of Tears or Mexican-American War period, or even from U.S. involvement in the Caribbean (Cuba, DR, etc.) during the turn of the century. It seems you guys are not at all lacking in source material-- it will be interesting to see what you come up with!
Though we had been struggling with git, we have mastered pushing and pulling new documents and changes to other team members. We also created new labels for our issues and began using the "projects" tab to create to-dos and keep track of our progress on individual parts of the project.
This week we also discussed the possibility of topic modeling, our site layout, and the use of images on our site. We are still looking for more sources from the American West. In addition to searching the internet, we plan to poke around on the Pitt Library site and reach out to professors at Pitt who may be able to help us. We decided to expand our net a bit to not only look at songs that mention native groups. We may include songs and poems that indirectly reference colonization, such as those that mention moving to new lands. The source that the German songs come from includes journal entries from the writer, so we may also look to journal entries. We are still casting a slightly wide net. Therefore, our goals for next week are to choose the texts, create a schema, and begin to mark-up the texts.