Digital Humanities – Spring 2018

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

 

I predict that this is a book deals with the mind of two individuals. The word “case” in the title is what brought me to that assumption. Perhaps these two have strange mindsets that could either create disadvantages or advantages for them. I expect the words “strange”, “peculiar,” “Doctor,” “extraordinary,” and “mad” (as in crazy).

 

Hyde was used a total of 97 times in correlation to Jekyll’s 83. The numbers are quite close which can reflect the connection and importance that these characters have in relation to each other. After realizing that they are the same person, or rather two different consciences acting under one body, the close count between the two names makes their contrasting behaviors even more interesting. I obviously do not know if the author tried to drop their names close to the same amount but that would be quite clever if he did. In this regard, the voyant tools help think about these sort of instances since I wouldn’t actually count their names by hand throughout the book.

Complex or unique phrases never went past the count so that was pretty consistent.

The distant reading was interesting in that it essentially gives readers a foundation to the novel. Voyant tools sort of dissects the novel and displays it in a statistical way. The visualizations methods are nice as well because they can change the perspective that one once had before going into the book. I think what Voyant tools can accomplish mainly is give writers and editor’s an easy way to view works and see consistencies within certain areas and other areas that need to be polished in terms of overused words/phrases.

-Grant Boyd

 

Upon choosing this title I had never read it before and had no clue what it is about. My prediction is that this is a novel about the expectations of life versus the realities of life. I expect the book is uplifting and revolving around one ultimate lesson about life’s journey. I think words that will appear frequently throughout the book will be “Life,” “Death,” “Think,” and “Know.” 

This is an image of what came up when I pasted all of the book’s contents into voyant tools. I was right about one of my words… “Know.” This was interesting to me because it was the last word I thought of but one of the most prominent words in the frequent word generator. After pasting only the first half of the book into voyant tools, this is what I got:

“Know” is no longer in the top five words most frequently used. This made me wonder if the word “know” has to do with knowledge gained in the second half of the novel. Maybe lessons have been learned or lessons are being discussed and the narrator or the reader is supposed to have gained new knowledge in the second half.

Looking back on the assignment, voyant tools was an interesting way to get a feel for a text without knowing anything about it. It is also an easy way, say if you decided to use the tool on multiple texts from one author, to get a feel for an author’s writing style by studying words they use repeatedly throughout multiple works.

 

Predictions:

Dracula, written by Bram Stoker is a gothic horror novel. I was intrigued by this novel because supernatural creatures have always been interesting to me. The novel cover shows a picture of Dracula, which reinforces many vampire stereotypes. Some of these stereotypes include vampires being pale, thin,red-eyed, with black/grayish hair. There is also blood around Dracula’s mouth, which obviously represents a vampire’s blood-sucking habits. In the novel, I predict that there will be a lot of violence, gruesomeness, and deaths. I think that Dracula will be the cause of these horrors, and deaths. Additionally, the gates shown behind Dracula on the cover led me to believe Dracula lives inside a castle, which is where I believe many terrible things will happen.

I believe that there will be a lot of fear represented in this novel. I can assume that Dracula is the antagonist of the novel, based on the novel cover and my background knowledge of vampires. I believe that there will be a lot of fear presented in this novel, which will be the catalyst to many conflicts.

Fantastical shows and novels have always been appealing to me because I love learning about myths, legends, and supernatural creatures, like Dracula. Vampire Diaries is one of my favorite shows. There are many fantastical characters and experiences throughout the show. The legend of vampirism is something that has always been fascinating to me.

 

Text Visualizations:

1. The first tool I used to visualize my text was a word cloud graph. This graph displayed the most commonly used words in the novel. One of the most frequent words used is “night.” Since the main character of the book is a vampire, it makes sense that this word is used 124 times. Additionally, this word reinforces the legend that vampires only come out at night. I found it very interesting, yet surprising that night is one of the smaller words in this graph. Some words, such as “man,” “deck,” and, “came” are bigger and bolder than “night,” but are used much less frequently in the novel. Ultimately, this graph is a great representation of many different frequent words used in the novel. Ultimately, this tool will help the reader get an idea of what the novel is about by using such a simple process. 
2. The second tool I used is a graph, which shows the most common words, in certain sections, or document segments of the text. Using this graph as a visualization tool was definitely effective. I was able to see a visualization of the most frequent tools, which is essential because I am a visual learner.  
3. The next text visualization tool that I used was the bubbles graph. This tool was an effective method for visualizing the text. I found this tool very interesting because of the way this graph represents the most frequent words in the text. I noticed that the words that are more frequently used are bolder in the bubble, while the bubble outlines slowly fade as the words become less frequent. Additionally, the blue words to the right of the bubbly graph also fade and grow smaller, as the words become less frequent. 

Analysis:

This assignment was definitely beneficial to me, and I am excited to use Voyant tools as an effective way to teach my future students.  The unique graphs shown on Voyant tools definitely gave me a representation and idea of what the novel is going to be about. Additionally, these tools will be helpful if I am analyzing multiple texts, written by the same author. I am definitely interested in using Voyant tools as a future teacher. I think that this technique will make the classroom a fun, learning environment. As a visual learner, I understand that interpreting a text can be difficult without seeing a visual representation, which is what Voyant tools provides. Additionally, when my future students are assigned readings, I think that using these tools will be a huge help to them because the students will have some knowledge about the text they are going to read before actually reading it. Having previous knowledge about a text will give students an easier time with understanding the plot of the text. I truly learned a lot from this assignment, and will definitely continue using Voyant tools.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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-Sarah Feinman

 

 

Kara Smith

When I initially chose The Flying Girl by L. Frank Baum I predicted that the book would likely be about a girl who learns how to fly a plane at a time when that was not a common occurrence. I believed the book would express some hints of early feminism by combating gender norms of the early 20th century. A few words I predicted I would see commonly used included “she”, “Fly”, “stop” and “girl”. The initial screenshot I took on Voyant showed me that some of the main characters were Orissa, Steve and Mr. Burthon. It showed me that there was a lot of dialog throughout this book due to how often the word said was repeated. It also confirmed my idea that this book would be about an airplane. After using some of the other tools, including bubbles, knots and veliza, I found that they can either give you some insight to the book or none at all. Bubbles was able to show how often words show up, alluding to some context clues, as well as when words became less frequently used and went away.The knots tool was not very valuable when looking for information about the book. It was difficult to understand what the knots should represent and therefore did not give any real insight on what this book could be about. Lastly, the veliza tool seemed to be successful in giving an insight into topics covered in this book. It allowed you to take quotes from the text and put it into a chat. By doing this you are able to see some of the context covered in the book and decide if that sparks your interest to read more about the book.