Topic Modeling Tool

 

The next tool I moved to on my corpus analysis journey was the topic modelling tool.

 

The Topic Modeling Tool is an interesting innovation because it utilizes MALLET (Machine Learning for Language Toolkit) to perform LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic modeling but also incorporates a user friendly interface allowing individuals like myself who can learn basic coding but just don’t understand how to troubleshoot when things go wrong.

 

The tool was created by David Newman, part of the Research Faculty of Computer Science at the University of California Irvine, and Arun Balagopalan and further developed by Jonathan Scott Enderle, a Digital Humanities Specialist at the Penn Library at the University of Pennsylvania.[1] Unfortunately Enderle has since passed and therefore development of the tool has stalled until someone else decides to take up cause.

 

Regardless the tool was still incredibly useful for my purposes.

 

It allows users to upload a stopwords list to exclude them from the analysis. The interface also allows users to select how many topics it would like to tool to run, how many topic words to print, as well as whether or not the analysis should dissect the corpus into n -word chunks. 

 

 

 

For my analysis I ran analyses with both N-word and without n-word chunks ranging from 4-12 topics in increases of 2.

 

And there were some interesting results in the data… which I will be writing about in my thesis.

 

If you would like to download the topic modeling tool and try it out you can find it here

 

https://github.com/senderle/topic-modeling-tool

 

Also, I realize that I never really explained how I chose my corpus… or what my corpus is so… next time!

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[1]Jonathan Scott Enderle. “GitHub - Senderle/Topic-Modeling-Tool: A Point-And-Click Tool for

Creating and Analyzing Topic Models Produced by MALLET.” GitHub, 10 Apr. 2017,

github.com/senderle/topic-modeling-tool. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025 ; “Department of English.”

Upenn.edu, 2021, www.english.upenn.edu/people/jonathan-scott-enderle. Accessed 6 Feb.

2025.; “David Newman.” Google.com, 2020, scholar.google.com/citations?user=3z

mSpYAAAAJ&hl=en. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025.