Lab Session: Digital Humanities

 Lab Session: Digital Humanities

In this blog, we have to share our experiences using these three tools and our learning outcomes. This activity was assigned by Dilip Barad Sir Click Here

1. Human or Computer? – Poem Test

In the beginning, we reflected on the long-standing debate: Can machines write poetry? To test this idea, 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 deeply about creativity, language, and the subtle differences between natural and artificial expression. It was surprising to see how closely machine-generated text can resemble human creativity, but also how certain emotional depths and nuances often remain distinct.

2. CLiC Dickens Project & Activity Book

The CLiC Concordance tool was used with Dickens’s David Copperfield, focusing on the character Mr. Dick. In Activity 8.1, we searched for every occurrence of “Dick” and noticed that many verbs linked to him showed little agency—he was often the recipient of action rather than the doer. Activity 8.2 refined this by filtering to “non-quotes,” highlighting the narrator’s description rather than other characters’ speech. Activity 8.3 isolated reporting clauses like said Mr. Dick, showing how much of his presence is tied to his spoken words. Activity 8.4 examined “long suspensions,” where the narrator interrupts his speech with descriptions of body language and emotion, which emphasized his mental states and expressions. Finally, Activity 8.5 filtered for words connected to body parts like head, face, or eyes, confirming how central his facial expressions are to his portrayal. Altogether, these activities demonstrated how digital tools can uncover patterns in characterization that might otherwise go unnoticed.

3. Voyant Tools

The third activity introduced us to Voyant, a text analysis platform. This tool allowed me to visualize word frequency, track themes, and examine language patterns in a text. Creating word clouds and trend graphs made the analysis more engaging, and it highlighted how certain terms or ideas dominate across passages.

Learning Outcomes

Through these three activities, I realized how digital methods can enrich literary study. The poem test made me reflect on creativity and authorship, the CLiC project trained me to spot textual patterns and character traits systematically, and Voyant introduced me to data-driven approaches in literature. Together, these tools improved my critical reading, analytical thinking, and digital literacy.

Thank You !