For this assignment, I had several novel in mind to use in Voyant.  With each novel I had certain impressions about repeating words.  For The Great Gatsby and The Bluest Eye, I noticed the use of colors in the novel and wanted to find out how much was used and if they were similar.  I had the impression that colors were used a lot in both novels, specifically the colors blue and yellow. The impression I had for The Day of the Locust was somewhat similar but the colors mentioned in the book were different, bordering on the metallic scale of colors.

I analyzed each book individually and was surprised by the results.  I expected to see a lot of usage for colors in each novel.  However, that was not the case.  The results were quite different than what I expected. Colors barely showed up on the visualization part of the program.  

Great Gatsby

Although the novel is very visual descriptively, the result from Voyant showed a different visual than the one that I had expected to see.  ‘Gatsby’ and ‘Daisy’ showed up, but ‘Tom’ showed up more that ‘Daisy’ and, surprisingly, ‘house’ showed up even more than those.  Also surprising was the number of times ‘eyes’ was used.  Most all of this was new information.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=1f6377e12f4415d8302d8b4b5e0f94d6

Bluest Eye

A similar experience happened in the novel.  Whereas I was expecting to see many colors, only the color of the title was prominent.  What was surprising was ‘Cholly” , “don’t” and “know” showing up as much as they did.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=5341dcf69e2b4eb3fd9b99c964f55855

Day of the Locust

At this point, I lowered my expectation as to what to expect since the images I had in mind and what Voyant visualized were different.  What was surprising here was to see ‘Earle” whom I had thought as a somewhat minor character show up many times.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=03ddb1d009689725c1ccbaa69ef0943e

Using this tool gave me a nice visual aspect to view the novel and expand how I analyze it.  With the prominence of certain words or characters, I am able to add another component to how to interpret a novel. Voyant is another tool to add to the toolbox.

I just finished a Zotero tutorial with one of the librarians and would like to share what I have learned.

Zotero is an open-source reference management application and add-on to manage bibliographic data and sources.  It was developed and is managed by the non-profit Corporation for Digital Scholarship at George Mason University.  It gives users a free cloud account with 300 MBs of storage and has options to have larger storage for a small fee.  The program offers many helpful tools to make researching, organizing, citing, and creating bibliographic information easy or easier and a much less time-consuming task.

Organizing

The interface is relatively simple and straight forward.  There are different ways to organize one’s resources: 

• The user can create Collections or Folders and subdivisions.  Having sources for each project is easy and can be placed in the same collection.  
• Tags can be added to each source or piece of material.  This makes sorting or searching for items easy.
• Related references can be linked that are located in different places in the library.
• Notes can be added to sources or materials.  This is similar to a stickie or Post-it, called Child.

There are 4 ways to add sources or materials (e.g. screen shots) in Zotero.

1. One way is to manually enter the information: author, title, publisher, etc.
2. A user can just drag a PDF into a collection and the program will automatically fill in the information.
3. Entering an Identifier (PMID, ISBN, etc.) is another option.
4. Using a browser plug-in will also work.

All of these will activate Zotero to fill in the bibliographical information of the source. One very helpful feature is that if a user right-clicks on a source in the collection and the source is Open Access, Zotero will retrieve the PDF and add it to the collection.

Citing

The program will cite sources in the body pf the writing as well as organize a bibliography for the work. Again, there several ways that a user can do this, either in the program itself or as part of a writing program.

1. A very helpful and time-saving feature is to generate a source page (Bibliography, Reference, Works Cited, etc.) for one’s work. From the program, one can right-click on an option and a very large selection of styles will appear.  The usual styles (Chicago, MLA, APA, etc.) are there along with a large host of others.  One can fine tune a style, add their own or retrieve another.  This makes it very adaptable to one’s needs.
2. Adding an in-text citation while writing is also another feature. And, again, one can choose the style to use for the citation.  Zotero will automatically add the citation and or footnote or whatever is correct in the style.

A user can add Zotero to a word processing program such as LibreOffice Writer, Microsoft Word or another program.  When that is done, a Zotero icon is added to that program and the same citations can be done with the click of a button.

Groups

Another feature in the program is the ability to create a group page.  This is helpful for group projects where the group can input and share sources.  The individual setting up the group has the ability to set perimeters as to what members can do. The group can store, add, edit or, search sources. 

The workshop was extremely helpful in learning the program and its time-saving features.  I also left with many other helpful tidbits of information such as the Hathi Trust database, LibreOffice Writer (open source instead of MS Word) and other nuggets.  I’m sure anyone writing in either academia or similar professions will benefit from this program, and it’s good to know if that if an individual subscribes for extra storage then it will benefit a non-profit company rather than a big tech behemoth. 

As K-12 and undergraduate programs continue to incorporate immersive, augmented and virtual reality technologies into lesson plans with ever greater frequency, educators seek, with ever greater rigor and exactitude, to formally assess the quality and efficacy of these tools: from defining a virtual tool’s learning outcomes, to measuring its success in achieving those outcomes, to student perceptions of immersion and usefulness. Hutson and Olsen (2022) and Makransky and Meyer (2022) demonstrate the variety of questions asked–and conceptual categories employed–in assessing augmented reality for education. Drawing theoretical principles from multimedia design, instructional design, and the cognitive-effective model of immersive learning, Makransky and Mayer highlight the importance of conceptually distinguishing between immersion–the concreteness and thoroughness of detail with which a virtual world is constructed, the experiential limits of its horizons defined by its creators—from perception, a student’s subjective sense of being submerged in that virtual world, with limited external distraction. Makransky and Meyer hypothesized that a group of middle school students taking a 360-degree, headset-enabled virtual trip to Greenland to learn about climate change would not only perceive a greater degree of immersion, interest and enjoyment compared to a group of their peers experiencing the same content in standard 2D video format, but would also perform better on immediate and later tests as a result of these higher levels of perception, interest and enjoyment. Their hypotheses validated, the authors reached the following conclusion based on their observations: “It appears that enjoyment and interest are involved in learning but in different ways. Enjoyment directly mediate[d] the results on the immediate posttest but not the delayed posttest. Alternatively, interest directly mediate[d] the results on the delayed posttest but [did not mediate] the immediate posttest” (p. 1787).