Session 5: Hands-on practice

In small groups:

First, share a bit of information about your corpora and research questions with each other.
Begin some experimentation using the clusters tool, working with your own corpus or any of the other corpora. Find a cluster that seems interesting, unusual, or distinctive. Consider what the clusters you find are telling you about your corpus. Compare notes as a group.
Choose a cluster that seems particularly revealing about your corpus and look at the individual terms from that cluster. Try each term as a separate query to expand your understanding of the semantic field for that term in your corpus.
Try using the “Compare” option to query the same terms in different corpora and see how the word neighbors differ. Can you come up with possible explanations of the differences, based on what you know about the corpora?
Share interesting results with your group and see what results you find by trying each other’s queries.

Questions to discuss and think about:

What differences in associated terms are evident among the different corpora in the group?
Are there terms that may have multiple spheres of meaning? Can you get at these with addition or subtraction?
Are there any preliminary findings at this stage? What have you learned about your corpus (and its differences from the other corpora in the group)?
If you were going to investigate this further, what would your next steps be? Where does this inquiry feel like it might be headed?

Time permitting, another exploration:

Using the “operations” tool, try constructing a query that helps reveal differentiations within a semantic space of interest to you: for instance, can you see evidence of how gender or wealth affects the language around the topics you’re exploring, by adding or subtracting terms like “man” or “woman” (or “rich” or “poor”)?
If you get an interesting result, try the same query in a different corpus: how do the results differ?

You may find it helpful to consulte the query experimentation suggestions, either as insipiration for this session or as you continue working with the Toolkit.

Word Vectors: Hands-on Practice and Group Work, Introductory Pedagogy-focused slide 01 of 8

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