Lab Session: Digital Humanities

 Lab Session: Digital Humanities 

Lab Session: Digital Humanities

In this blog, I am sharing my experience of using three digital tools and what I learned from them during the lab session assigned by Dilip Barad.

Human or Computer? – Poem Test

The first activity focused on an interesting question: can machines really write poetry? In this task, we were given a poem and asked to decide whether it was written by a human or generated by a computer. This activity made me think about creativity, language, and the difference between human imagination and machine production. I realized that computer-generated poetry can sometimes closely imitate human writing. However, I felt that human poetry still carries deeper emotions and subtle meanings that are difficult for machines to fully reproduce.

My Experience with CLiC

The second activity involved using CLiC to examine the word “chin” in literary texts. The results were surprising. I found that Charles Dickens used the word chin 317 times, whereas other nineteenth-century writers used it about 113 times, and Jane Austen used it only once.

This comparison helped me understand that Dickens often used physical descriptions to build his characters, sometimes linking facial features with humor, personality, or social class. In contrast, Austen focused more on conversation, manners, and social interactions rather than detailed physical descriptions.

Through this activity, I learned that even a small word like chin can reveal important aspects of an author’s style. The frequency counts and concordance lines also showed how digital tools can help connect linguistic patterns with literary interpretation. Overall, it helped me see how body language and physical features contribute to character development in fiction.

Voyant Tools

The third activity introduced us to Voyant Tools, a digital platform used for textual analysis. With this tool, I could visualize word frequencies, track recurring themes, and examine patterns in language throughout a text. Features such as word clouds and trend graphs made the analysis more interactive and easier to understand, highlighting the most frequently used words and concepts in the text.

Learning Outcomes

Through these three activities, I realized how digital technologies can support and enrich literary studies. The poem activity encouraged me to reflect on creativity and authorship. The CLiC task helped me observe patterns in language and better understand how authors construct characters. Meanwhile, Voyant introduced me to data-based methods for analyzing texts.

Overall, these activities improved my critical thinking, analytical ability, and familiarity with digital research tools used in modern literary studies.