The Technical Digital Humanities Researcher
Twenty-Five year old Reena is a graduate student in a computer science PhD program. She has offered to help work on a small Natural Language Processing project in partnership with some people in the Sociology department, who have been collecting diary entries from high school athletes as they write about their experiences with stress management. She has access to the transcribed text from the diaries, and she knows that the Sociology department has been looking at a few clustering algorithms in order to get a preliminary understanding of what topics to look for in the diaries. Reena wants to quickly provide them with some analyses using tools that she already knows and trusts without the hassle of writing a lot of code, as she is busy with her other obligations.
Goal: Reena wants to use text processing algorithms to analyze particular properties of text, likely for the purpose of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of an algorithm, rather than focusing on the text itself. She has exposure to how the algorithms themselves function, so she needs a tool that gives her the flexibility to conduct exploratory analyses that she is interested in without having to write a line of code. She would likely use the web application if it were faster/easier than writing Python code that accomplished the same functions, and if the application had the flexibility for her to modify parameters for calculations that she would want to see.