I am a God

My text-mining debacle has revealed a personality trait I didn’t know I had. I am stubborn. I decided to finish transcribing my seventeenth century biographies of Caravaggio into MS Word. I chose the three texts that are most often used by art historians; one of which is written by a man who knew (and hated) Caravaggio. Then, I took my word document to a friend’s house who confirmed ahead of time that Wordle does in fact function properly on her computer. So, I tried to open my Word documents on her computer and for some reason Word was not opening. I cursed the Gods, then opened the documents on MY computer, copied and pasted them into emails and sent them to myself. THEN I had a debacle trying to figure out how to cop and paste on a Mac. After pushing a lot of buttons I figured it out and managed to put each biography into Wordle separately. I also made a word cloud with all three bios combined. The results were exactly what I expected. After a brief struggle while attempting to save the images, I have completed the first phase of my visualizations for my project. I hate technology A LOT more now than I did two weeks ago.

I still plan on doing some image-mining, but I’ve decided not to include maps with the locations where he created his paintings. Mostly because the location is unknown for the majority of them, and some of the images I’ve decided to use are not 100% confirmed as authentic Caravaggios.

If anyone has any suggestions for image-mining technology, I’d appreciate it. I’d like to be able to see all the images at once  like the examples we saw in class. I’d also like to be able to tag each work with Title/Date/Patron/Location.

 

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