From The Carletonian collection in the Carleton College Digital Archives, we extracted texts that once appeared in past newspaper issues which are the most relevant to dining and food service on campus. Some of the content is concerned with proposals for improving the dining experience, while others feature campus events and extracurricular activities held at the dining halls. Out of the twenty-five top search results, we copied the title and main parts of the articles and pasted them into a .txt file. (Some of the top twenty-five matched issues contained multiple articles about dining and food service, and we looked into each of those articles to capture any pertinent information.)
After compiling the texts, we imported the .txt file into Voyant Tools to run a text analysis, creating a word cloud as well as a network web. The visualizations delineated the relative frequencies and associations between the most frequently occurring words from The Carletonian articles.
This data visualization can help show what parts of the dining experience have concerned students over the years. By looking at the word cloud, it’s pretty easy to quickly see what parts of the dining experience are stressed. There’s the names of the dining halls, as well as different dietary restrictions, and meaningful words like “atmosphere.” Ultimately, I think this data is exploratory, but one would definitely have to look at individual articles for more context.
We utilized the “Edit List” function and manually added words and phrases that we did not consider semantically meaningful. By creating the stopwords list, we prevented words such as “carleton”, “says” and “dining” from taking up the bulk of the space in the word cloud. We also chose to show 115 words, so it won’t be too overwhelming or too few to demonstrate the pattern.