I’m thinking a bit about the subject coverage across MWDL collections, and the patterns that emerge when we get collections on the same topics across the different states that MWDL serves. I’m just starting to explore the idea of doing some work with visualization tools, and I thought I would put up my first try at using Voyant’s Cirrus, which is a tool for working with text. Documentation on Voyant is available at http://docs.voyant-tools.org/. I’m interested in exploring more about the tools used in digital humanities work, and how that might also help us engage with digital collections in new ways. So, here’s my first, very simple word cloud! To get the data to run through Voyant, I exported all the MWDL collection names I have saved in the handy tracking spreadsheet that I use for my ingestion work. I added the words “collection” and “collections” to Voyant’s pre-populated list of stop words. Here’s a link to the MWDL collections information loaded into Voyant.

Word Cloud graphic

I’ll post more as I continue to work with these ideas, I’m just getting started!