I chose to inquire about the book The Cash Boy by Horatio Alger, Jr. I believed that the book would be about a boy who was very eager to make a good living because he grew up poor.  I assumed that I would see the words “money” “rich” “children” “poor” and “job” a lot. When I copied and pasted the book into Voyant Tools, I saw that my predictions for words that would be used often weren’t exactly correct- but I wasn’t surprised, considering that I’ve never heard of this book, nor did I read it. I didn’t predict that the word “said” would be used a lot, and it was, however that also doesn’t surprise me considering that it seems as if there was a lot of dialog in this book. The words were all pretty simple and nothing is extravagant or hard to understand, which makes sense since I did find it under the children’s fiction section. I think that this assignment was very intriguing- I never knew that you could copy and paste an entire book into a website and learn so much about it! I could see myself using this in the future, especially if I need to skim a book to look it over.

 

             

For this blog post, I worked with Voyant tools to try to be able to visualize what the meaning of a novel is about. I choose the Woman in White by Wilke Collins which is a mystery fiction book so from that I predicted that a woman was seen at a crime scene or a place where she shouldn’t have been and the detective call her the Woman in white because she was wearing white. The story would revolve around the woman and I think it could be a thriller. By going to the gutenberg website and using their bookshelves I was able to copy the plain text of the novel into Voyant tools. From there I played with the tools and found that in one word wall the name “Laura” comes up and I suppose the Woman in white is named Laura. Percival, time, and halcombe come up pretty big in word web which makes me think that those words are important to the plot. For phrases, the most the same phrase came was twice so that wasn’t much help, but I see how it is helpful with other texts. Overall, the tools I worked with were helpful and could be used as a great teaching tool

. 

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.

Garrett Sweeney

Intro to Digital Humanities

 

Predictions- I predict the the book King Solomon’s Mine is going to be about a mine in Africa that produces an expensive good like oil or diamonds. Many Africans work on the mine and it is run by a foreign country like England. It is going to be a mild violent, adventurous book. The words “money” , “mine” and “rich” are going to appear frequently.

 

My predictions were not accurate because the book seems to have a deeper meaning than the title. I would have to read more to have a good understanding of the book.

For this assignment, I used Voyant Tools to look at the The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The book was listed in the Sci-fi genre so I guessed it would include a lot of talk about “space” and “time”, perhaps “journey,” or “adventure” along with a protagonist, an antagonist, and maybe a love interest.

To my surprise, many of the words involved parts of a ship and water. This was an oceanic adventure, not a sci-fi book. I am not sure whether the names that are high up on the list are protagonists or not, but it can be assumed that characters and their relationships with each other are at least of equal importance as the journey itself, just judging by the contents of the word cloud. I was also correct in my guess of the word “time.” Many stories in the sci-fi genre relate to the study of time, and the book itself had “time” in the title making it a safe word to guess.

The benefits of these tools seem clear to me. Users can gain a broad understanding of the subjects of a given work or works, and guess at themes or symbols within. This technology could have many applications in history and the humanities in analyzing the popularity of certain words, and interpreting this analysis to prove a point.

The limitations are that without reading the books themselves, the amount of information that can be gathered about it is limited. This tool seems the most useful when studying a large amount of data that cannot be read easily, such as archival documents, or receipts in order to find patterns in word usage, but as far as textual analysis goes, it leaves much to be desired.

Ultimately this is still a relatively new technology and all the applications have yet to be explored. Still it provides a template and a useful tool to poke around with and create new and varied elements of analysis.

Zeke Johnson

 

The book I chose to play around with was “The Secret Agent” by Joseph Conrad. When making predictions about this novel, I was totally assuming it would be all about a spy on missions and leading a double life. Based on the results I saw in Voyant Tools, I was totally wrong. The book definitely has more dialogue and a deeper plot than I was giving it credit. It was actually really interesting to see what words were used the most in this book, some of them I had no idea what they even meant! I can definitely see myself doing this activity in a future high school classroom setting. I think students would benefit from using Voyant Tools because it is an engaging way to find information about a book. The only negative comment I have to make about this process is that if you do not tell the computer system to exclude words such as to, Mr., Mrs., said, etc, the visualization can become skewed. I also had never know about the Guttenberg website, I am so intrigued that you can just copy and paste an entire book for free like that! I definitely see myself using that tool to finally read some things that seem interesting!

 

Emily Hatch