Lincoln Logarithms, a new project from the Digital Scholarship Commons at Emory University, uses four text analysis tools, MALLET, Voyant, Paper Machines, and Viewshare, to examine 57 full text sermons given on the occasion of Lincoln’s assassination. Interesting enough in its own right, the project also explicitly addresses some the major obstacles in DH projects:
- Can digital tools always make our research more innovative–or sometimes, do they just get in the way?
- Would the digital programs offer new insights and save us time? Or would they clutter up an otherwise straighforward textual analysis?
- Digital tools can help us hone in on what questions to ask. They are a way to help us arrive at questions and results, but they aren’t results.