Assignments
Digital Media Analysis
Students use text analysis and data visualization over a set of tweets to understand the public's perception of a relevant criminal justice issue and report their findings in a 4–5 page paper.
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Newspaper framing of separation of families at the United States border
Students use text analysis to analyze how the separation of families at the U.S. border is framed in newspapers, then write a formal paper incorporating their analysis and supporting visualizations.
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Mapping Segregation and Inequalities in the Boston Area
Using ArcGIS software, students create digital maps illustrating the relationships between residential segregation and social inequalities.
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Algorithmic Representations of Philosophical Arguments and Conceptual Frameworks
Students design algorithmic representations of philosophical arguments and metaphysical/epistemological frameworks that organize the philosophical materials in terms of an input-processing-output model...
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A comparison of authors writing using text analysis
Students write a report comparing the writing of two authors using word unigram and bigram analysis and submit a Jupyter Notebook showing the code used to extract the data used in the analysis.
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Open-ended Network Analysis
Students pick a dataset, extract a network from it, then write a report describing it.
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Fitting probability models for Author detection
Using a custom python script and google colab, students extract word frequencies from raw text files on Project Gutenberg and analyze them in an attempt to identify an mystery author.
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Text Analysis of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
Using Voyant/Text Analysis, Students investigate how various “witnesses” reported on and recorded the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911.
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Where should one live in the US to minimize uninsured medical costs?
Students analyze aggregate Medicare claim information from US hospitals to answer the question: where should someone live to minimize their medical costs?
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Concepting and Creating a Chatbot
Students will develop a concept and create a chatbot (automated, interactive persona) using a bot-building website.
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Concepting and Creating a Twitter Bot
Students will develop a concept and create a Twitter bot (automated account) using a Google Sheets template.
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Humor Studies as a Social Network
Students use a Google sheet to chart the references in a multidisciplinary set of articles on humor. This data set will be used later in the semester to chart humor studies as a social network and allo...
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Media Framing during the Civil Rights Movement
Students identify an event that has occurred since 1945 in relation to the struggle for civil rights in America, and using the text analysis tool, Voyant, write an essay that analyses the media's frami...
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Digital Essay
Students will create a 3-4 minute digital essay for their final project in ENG218: Argument-based writing.
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Network analysis of The Wire
Students will use social network analysis of the characters in HBO's The Wire to make an argument and write a paper.
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School Violence Class Project
Class members will work in pairs to first build a data set of school shooting events and later in the semester, a dataset of workplace shooting events in the United States.
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Professional Writing Text Comparison for Word Choice, Style, and Audience
Students will use Voyant to compare professionally written journalism texts across genres to analyze word and style choices and make connections to intended audience.
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Language Analysis through Tweets
Use text analysis to compare a collection of tweets in two conditions to draw conclusions about the content or style of communication in these contexts.
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Map regional Islamic history with GoogleEarth
Generate a tour in GoogleEarth that presents the key features of Islamic history with respect to a given region.
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What Makes a Witch? A Salem Witch Trials network analysis
Using network analysis and the Salem Witchcraft Papers, students will write a research essay that combines both qualitative and quantitative primary sources.
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U.S. Holocaust Memorials and Museums
In this assignment, students analyze an interactive map with layers (geographic location of all monuments, and geographic spread of monuments by decade) as well as a timeline showing the number of monu...
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Comparing Centrality Measures.
Using small scale graphs ( or networks ) at first, student will compute degree centrality, closeness/farness centrality, and betweenness centrality for the purpose of comparing these measures and devel...
Testing Hypotheses About Our Own Language
Students will examine samples of their own language using Lexos to test hypotheses about how they communicate.
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Local/Regional Perspectives on the Myth/Enlightenment Dialectic (respectively, Wallerstein’s world-sy...
Students individually create a set of overlays (images, labeled paths, tours, texts, etc.) in GoogleEarth Pro indexing some of the major events and developments of a particular geographical-social-cult...
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Philosophical Argument Formalization/Visualization
Students express the underlying logical structure of a philosophical text by formalizing the connections between its constituent claims as a bimodal hierarchical tree.
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Testing Hypotheses and Research Questions through Social Network Analysis
Students will create hypotheses related to co-occurance and/or influence based on a specific interest, construct a dataset based on this interest, and test the hypotheses through network analysis.
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Mapping Community Level Characteristics Associated with Opioid Related Deaths in Massachusetts
Using GIS, students will map community level characteristics associated with opioid related deaths in Massachusetts.
Group Analysis of Team Proposal Using Textual Visualization Tools Lexos and Voyant
Students utilized the textual analysis tools of Lexos and Voyant to identify and analyze word frequencies, positive and negative correlations or juxtapositions of words across a collaborative document ...
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Framing Analysis of the Opioid Crisis in Print News
Students identify dominant frames in opioid crisis new stories using text analysis.
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Salem Witch Trials network analysis
Using the digitized Salem Witchcraft Papers, students will identify and create a network analysis of the persons involved in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692.
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Using words to infer methodology and formulate hypothesis on a given topic
Using Lexos or Voyant, the assignment will require students to search for and clean data, infer from content analysis about methodology used, and to formulate a hypothesis about the causation for the t...