Data Mining

What is data mining? How can it be useful to us? Well, data mining is the process of taking large amounts of data from a database and examine it to introduce a new set of information. There are many tools you can use to conclude such information. Google’s Ngram Viewer compares is a data mining tool then can search for the frequencies of words used in books. Ngram Viewer searches through the hundreds of millions books from the 1500s to 2008 that were digitized into Google books.

Before we ran the chart for the frequencies of words used we determined what words we would use from our Previous blog spot “The Power of Digitizing”. To determine this we used another type of a data mining tool called Voyant. Voyant is a web based text reader that can determine common words used, linkages between words, and many other features about a text. Voyant provides new and unique ways to further analyze text. In other words, Voyant gives you a more in-depth look of your text. This tool can also be very helpful in the terms of allowing you to grasp the concept/idea of the text more quickly because it pulls out the most used words in the text and the connections between them and the words that were used less frequently.

Our words of most use did  not come as a surprise to us. Consciousness, humans, life, intelligence are all things we talk a lot about in our blog. These words are used to describe the pieces of literature we read, and the field of digital humanities itself. What did come as a surprise is how the words human and life don’t seem to have any correlation.

Data mining is very useful and helpful. These online tools can help people conduct more thorough research and also make research easier. They also can make reading much more simplistic and dynamic. Data mining is providing us with new and easier ways to conduct research and analyze text.