In order to work on this module, I needed to first actually decide what I was doing for my final project, because the instructions said to choose two tools for the module that would help most with my research project. I went to check out the databases provided in the final project's instructions, and I was excited to find the Feeding America one, containing old cookbooks. Cooking is definitely one of my favourite hobbies and I know from experience that old cookbooks can contain some pretty wild information. As well, I know that due to women not being given as much of a voice historically, alternate sources often need to be used to document women's experiences, and cookbooks have certainly been a great place for that.

So, deciding to work with these cookbooks to discuss women's history, I set out with Module 4. I chose Exercise 2 (Topic Modeling Tool) and Exercise 4 (Text Analysis with Overview). I felt that they would both be useful tools to work through the cookbook data and find the important parts. You can find the results of both of these exercises here. I also discussed both of them in the same notebook entry, which can be found here.

Although I had said otherwise in my research notebook, I think that the Topic Modelling Tool will not be so useful to me for my final project. It allowed me to pull the important topic words from the data provided for the exercise, which was a neat way to start to strain all the data for further analysis. I also like that one of the output files helps you find which documents contain which words. Unfortunately, I realised as I was going through the data for my final project that although the cookbooks do contain information about women's experiences, they are first and foremost cookbooks, and so this tool would only really return ingredients and cooking instruction words.

Overview, however, was something I have already been using for my final project. It was a little difficult to use at first - it had changed its layout since the exercise instructions were written, and so I ended up turning to the Slack space for help. My notebook reflects that; I expressed dismay with it there. However, the word cloud is a useful and easy to use tool, as is the multisearch tool. The word cloud was certainly useful when I first did this exercise, as it made the major topics of the data provided very obvious. Despite being disappointed with it when I first continued with this exercise, it has since been a useful tool to determine which words to look for when analyzing the cookbooks. Unfortunately, the word cloud, like the Topic Modeling Tool, still returns mostly cooking words, but the Multisearch tool is so nice, and I love how it also lets you look at all the documents that contain that word right there in Overview. I will still probably need to use some other tools that I did not explore yet for my final project, but thanks for getting me on the right track, Overview!