Text: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Prediction: I predict that this is a romantic novel with a main focus on the woman, Anna Karenina. I believe that Anna and the main man in the novel will fall in love, but there is a major conflict between the two’s lives, perhaps their families, that does not allow them to be together. I also think that by the end, several characters will have died, maybe even Anna herself.
Text Visualizations:
This graph displays the most common words in specific sections of the text. This shows that “alexandrovich” was the most written word in the text, and which sections it was written the most.
This graph displays the most commonly used phrases in the novel. In this graph, you can see that “alexandrovich” is the first word at the beginning of each phrase, once again emphasizing that this is the most commonly used word.
This graph displays in a word cloud the most commonly used phrases in the novel. I found it odd that in every other graph, “alexandrovich” is displayed the most, but in this visualization it is smaller than many other words. “Said” is the largest word in this graph, and therefore is the most commonly said word according to this visualization. This is also the only visualization that displays the word “Anna,” which I found interesting because her name is in the title of the novel, and so I predicted that a majority of the novel would be concerning her, but through these graphs it does not seem to be the case.
Results: Through this assignment, I was able to find the advantages and disadvantages of these text visualization tools. The advantages are that the reader can see the most commonly occurring words and phrases in the novel, discovering the most important aspects, and where these aspects occur the most. Through these tools, I was able to recognize the most vital parts of the novel include Alexandrovich, who through research I discovered is the main male character. This contradicts with my predictions, as I expected Anna herself to be the true main character in the novel, as her name is the title of the novel, but these text visualizations say otherwise. The disadvantages of these tools could be that they may not agree with each other, creating a mixed message for the user. For these visualizations, two of them stated “alexandrovich” as the most commonly used word, but in the third, “alexandrovich” is shown as smaller and therefore used less frequently than words such as “said” and “anna.” Overall, I think these tools are very useful for readers to understand the main points of a novel before they even read the novel; the user will know what points of the novel are important, and therefore what to look out for when reading the novel.