Textual Analysis: Frequencies and Stop Words in Dirty Text

Abstract

The third of the six Digital Humanities assignments, Textual Analysis, is presented in this chapter, beginning with a brief introduction to textual analysis as an analytical method of great interest to humanities programmers. The assignment description (written in a form and with a point-of-view suitable to be copied and pasted into materials given directly to students), required support files and resources, skills utilized in the assignment (which include file I/O, string methods and indexing, and an introduction to algorithm design), assignment management techniques and issues (mostly involved with helping students learn to build mental models to deal with abstract structures, like parallel lists), atomic code for the assignment (a solar system planet exercise), expected output from student submitted work in this assignment, and variations for a number of student skill levels are provided.