Annotated Bibliography

Cortez-Davis, Evelyn. December Sky: Beyond My Undocumented Life. Altadena, CA: In Xochitl in Cuicatl Productions, 2005. Print.

This testimonial about Evelyn Cortez, a young woman who recounts her experiences in El Salvador, the events that led her and her family to immigrate to the United States, and up to finally when she received her citizenship through the Amnesty Act of 1986.  As part of our project to answer the question if it was possible to track the circumstances that explains why Latinas would immigrate from their native homes.  

Graham, Shawn, Scott Weingart, and Ian Milligan. "Getting Started with Topic Modeling and

MALLET." Web log post. The Programming Historian. N.p., 2 Sept. 2012. Web. 7 Dec.

2014.

This blog offers an explanation about how to use and understand the program, MALLET, another topic modeling software; however, it does offer some explanation about the practice of topic modeling itself.  It further proves itself a useful article when explaining what topic modeling is meant to do, and how to understand what it actually does.  It clarified that a topic modeling tool is a set of computers that attempts to make semantic meaning out of a text, whether they be a single document or multiple documents, by looking for patterns in the way the words are used (2010).  It goes through this process multiple times until it has generated a certain amount of topics based on what the user asks the program to find.     

Menchú, Rigoberta, and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. London: Verso, 1984. Print.

This testimonial follows an Indigenous woman of El Quiche, a descendent of the Mayan community in guatemala named Rigoberta Menchu, who recounts her experiences growing up in her Indigenous community and her activist work to fight against the Guatemalan government from taking lands from her community and other Indigenous communities.  She also reveals how she was hunted by the Guatemalan army for her activist work that played a large factor in her decision to flee the country.  This testimonial would serve as a piece of text that told about the different circumstances that forced Latinas to leave their native homeland.       

Posner, Miriram, and Andy Walace. "Very Basic Strategies for Interpreting Results from the Topic Modeling Tool." Miriam Posners Blog. N.p., 29 Oct. 2012. Web. 14 Dec. 2014.

This blog offers a simple introduction to topic modeling (in comparison to the introductory blog provided by Graham, Weingart and Milligan, 2012).  Further, this blog also offers a more specific tutorial regarding the Topic Modeling Tool, which is the program the research group for this particular project has selected to use.  Posner also acknowledges the difficulty handling the MALLET program, and suggests that the Topic Modeling Tool offers a both a simpler approach to topic modeling, and an interesting program for its low barrier in its own TMT programming that it generates much less incoherent results than the MALLET program.  Posner offers different approaches on how to interpret and create an effective approach at creating a visual of the results the computer managed to compute.