LA Practice A3: Conduct a mixed analysis (Activity)

In this project, the learner will analyze A Midsummer Night’s Dream using the web application Voyant Tools, to make predictions about the text and compose a mixed literary analysis by closing reading an excerpt from the text and supporting claims with quantitative evidence. (60-90 minutes)

Adapted from the lesson Counting Characters from Tom Liam Lynch, on behalf of Mosaic Education Consulting Group, for CS4All.

By the end of this activity, learners will be able to...

• Examine text as data and how it operates in a computational system
• Mine data from a text using Voyant Tools
• Explore graphical representations generated by Voyant Tools to make predictions about a text
• Combine quantitative evidence (graphs / tables) and qualitative evidence (excerpts from text) to formulate a literary analysis question

• Abstraction: Isolating key details while ignoring the remaining elements.
• Decomposition: The process of breaking down complex problems into smaller, more manageable parts.
• Modularity: a process that completes a single task is more useful when it can be chained together with other processes to accomplish something more complex.
• Generalization: the process of grouping together component parts by general characteristics, and unnecessary details filtered out.

• Voyant Tools: https://voyant-tools.org/
• Play by scenes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1_nfA-Ygm2iTnpnNUg1OTNVSnc/view
• Full Play: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/full.html

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