Digital Humanities

Constellate is a tool one may use to either conduct or to learn data and text analysis designed by ITHAKA using content from JSTOR and Portico databases. Additionally, Constellate can be used to build custom data sets for nearly any humanities research project.

Constellate is a great tool to generate questions with. The key terms graph can help you think about frequently used words using your keywords. Once you have some key words you can compare them using the third graph to compare frequencies of word choice.

• Why is there an increase/decrease in this decade?
• Is there a correlation between frequency of use?
• Why is one word used over another?

Build your Dataset

From the Constellate home page, you can start by entering keywords in the “Build your dataset” field and hit return or enter.

What is a Dataset?

Datasets are a collection of documents that you want to analyse and/ or visualize. By using Constellate you can find many documents that the school has access to and then visualize them using graphs.

Refine Your Dataset

• Once Constellate has run your data, you’ll get a new page. On the left side, you’ll find fields to enter additional information including titles, authors, or keywords. 

• Moving down, you may enter  publication titles, publication dates, and select language preferences.

 

• Constellate also allows you to sort your data by document types, providers, categories, and data that you can download. It’s important to note that Framingham State University only has access to JSTOR; Chronicling America is public access. If you’re just curious about the representation of scholarship on a topic and not interested in downloading articles, leave the “Provider” boxes unchecked; otherwise, select your preferences to get data you want. 

• Once you’ve run the filters, Constellate builds several graphs. 
• The first graph shows documents published by decade, by clicking on one of the providers you can deselect it. 

 

 

 

• The second graph includes Keyphrases from the articles created from your keywords.

 

 

 

• The third graph allows you to refine your data to see how common words were in each decade.

 

 

 

• The fourth graph can document categories over time.

 

 

 

• The fifth graph creates a category tree map that visualizes your topic in the context of different fields of study.

 

 

 

• The last thing on the page are all the documents in your data set. Although you may not have immediate access to all of the articles, you may click on them to read abstracts and think about whether they might be useful for your research. If so, you may want to order them through Interlibrary loan.

 

Using Constellate to Learn Python

If you want to take your data visualization a step further you can also use Constellate to learn the programming language, Python. Constellate can help you by teaching the basics of Python using Jupyter notebooks. 

 

Python Basics One

• The lesson starts by introducing data types which include integers (whole numbers), floats (decimals), and strings (text).
• Python uses math so it follows parentheses, exponents, multiplication and division, and addition and subtraction (PEMDAS). To add integers or floats to a string they must be converted by using a data type.
• Variables must be assigned a value using the equal sign (=). The three rules of variables are that they cannot be one word, must include only letters, numbers, and the underscore sign (_), and that they cannot begin with a number.
• A function allows users to pass parameters into it. The print function will print whatever is put into it. The input function allows you to take users input.

Python Basics Two

• This lesson starts by explaining how a system can determine its next steps by using Boolean values, which have two possible values: either true or false. While one equal sign (=) assigns a value to an operator, two equal signs (==) check if two variables are the same value. Additionally, the less than (<), greater than (>), less than or equal to (<=), greater than or equal to (>=), and not equal to (!=) signs can be used to determine if the problem is true or false.
• Boolean operators (and/or/not) can also be used to create expressions that evaluate to a single Boolean value. If one condition is false in an ‘and’ operator, then the answer is false. If one condition is true in a ‘or’ operator then the answer is true. The ‘not’ operator only operates on a single expression essentially flipping true to false or false to true. 
• An ‘if’ statement says if true, then perform this action and ‘if’ false, skip over this action. The ‘elif’ statement provides another option while the ‘else’ statement is used when all the other options have been tried. 

Fall 2021

Kelsey Rhodes, Framingham State U, Class of 2023

Work Cited

"Constellate." Constellate, constellate.org/.