Digital Humanities – Spring 2018

I have never read this book or heard of this author before, but because I’m going to school to become a 1st grade teacher I chose children’s fiction.  If I had to make some assumptions about what this book could be about. I would say that this will be about children playing on a dock, maybe the Hickory Dickory nursing rhyme will be written in this text.

I think this will take place in England long ago. This is supposed to be geared towards children so I believe that this book will have some fantasy in it. I would expect the word “child”, “mama”, “dock”, “hickory” to appear frequently in this text.

The author is L. T. Meade and the genre is Children’s fiction. I predict that there will be some big conflict the children will have to overcome. There will be laughter, childishness and nurturing throughout this book.

After using Voyant Tools, I now see that none of the words that I assumed would be in this text were correct. I also see that “baby” is a very popular word in this text, 99 times exactly. I don’t know exactly why “flossy” is used some much though, I assume that maybe it is someone’s name?

 

Using this program I think could be beneficial when looking at other types of text maybe? I’m not really into this program although I think its neat. I hope to learn more about why this kind of program is beneficial to me.

-Monique Walsh

The Lock and Key Library

By Julian Hawthorne

 

I have never read this book before but if I had to guess I would assume it revolves around a library. I think a somewhat wealthy or at least upper-class man has a library in his house, and is trying to court a young woman, or the woman is in love with him. I think the man has an extravagant library in his house but keeps it rather concealed for certain, unknown reasons. She attempts to sneak through his house at the darkest hours of the night in attempt to unveil the secrets of the library.

 

Words that I think will be prevalent in the text: dark, stormy, key, library, fear, curious

Words that are prevalent: man, house, room, hand, eyes

 

While doing the project, I found that pretty much none of the terms I thought would be most common are the most common. In fact, the text focuses a lot on an entire house rather than just a library location within a house. I am assuming as well, that a lot of the novel’s curiosity (being a detective/crime novel) surrounds the man who owns the house because the word man is one of the most frequent throughout many segments in the novel. This observation can also be indicative of the tendency for male authors to depict male protagonists (or antagonists in this case?) at this time period. This raises all sorts of questions regarding gendered characters, such as if a male author has the agency/ability to depict a female persona (which I personally believe is possible). The line graphs are informative as well. Early on, the word “house” peaks at its highest usage, and then throughout the middle of the novel, the word “man” plateaus at a peak for much of the novel. The house in which the novel seems to be set is a main focus at the forefront of the novel, while the man (or men) who is a persona in the novel is the main focus for much of the remaining text. Also looking at the word connectivity, I found that the “house” was connected to words such as “haunted” and “went” “away”. These combinations not only identify gothic elements within the novel, but inform us about the setting and ocurences. This program is honestly really cool and useful. From my own personal experience, I was a research assistant for Dr. Karla Alwes and her book about John Keats. One aspect of my research included assembling a concordance of all the recurring/significant words across 4 of his major poems (The Lamia, The Fall of Hyperion, To Autumn and The Cap and Bells). This program would have made that job significantly easier to accomplish and I really wish I knew about it at the time. I think publishers, scholars, writers and teachers could all find this tool useful, not only to consciously see what is prevalent within a specific novel, but also to find trends across texts for research and future knowledge about literature.

 

Peter McKasty

 

This blog post will include textual visualization based on the novel “Only A Girl’s” Love by Charles Garvice. The use of Voyant Tools and Gutenburg allowed me to take data and transform it into an image that could be analyzed.

 

Choosing a text to use was easy. The requirements were to find a fictional text that you never read before. I used the tabs provided to find fictional novels. There were many different styles of fictional texts. Some included: Adventure, Fantasy, Horror, and Mystery. Of course, being the hopeless romantic that I am, I chose Romance. The romance tab took me to a page where there was a list of romance novels. I picked “Only A Girl’s Love”  because the title stood out to me. Once I picked a novel, I had to get it into plain text form so that it was compatible with Vayant Tools.

 

This is “Only A Girls Love” in plain text. Pretty basic. Impossible to read.

 

Before I started playing around with the Voyant tools, I made a prediction of what I thought the novel would be about. I have never read this novel. I haven’t even heard of it.  I predicted that the novel was a love story about a girl’s first and only love. I thought that the most common words used in the novel would be “love”, “girl”, “home”, “death”. I thought “love”, “girl” and “home were obvious words, but since it was a love story I wasn’t totally sure the word “death” would be used. However, I was interested to find out.

After my predictions were made, I copied the novel from Plain Text into a word document where I could eliminate anything that was not part the novel. This includes information about the publication and any additional information that I found. This was necessary for finding data that was valid. All the added information was not “apart of the novel”.

 

Once all additional information was deleted, I could paste my novel into the Voyant Tools generator to get my information.

 

 

After you a short wait while Voyant Tool works its magic, I got two charts that looked like the two above. The only thing that was different was that the word “said” was listed as a frequently used word. Because I think “said” is not an important word in this situation, I decided to have that word taken out. I really liked the chart that included the cluster of words. Each word was is a different size to indicate how frequently they are used in the novel. Based on both charts, the words “stella” and “leycester” were used the most. The word love is on the chart, but it is not used as much as I thought.

I played around with the Voyant Tool and created this chart. I am not sure what the chart is supposed to mean. I think the colors indicate different words, but I am not sure what the different loops and directions mean.

 

I think Voyant Tools is a great resource to use when analyzing word choice in different types of novels. It would be interesting to compare the words in this romantic novel compared to another romantic novel. Would we see similar words?

 

In this blog post, I will explore the data of the novel “Wuthering Heights,” by Emily Bronte, using the online platforms Gutenberg and Voyant tools. I apologise in advance for the blurry screenshots, my MacBook was very frustrated with me throughout this entire process.

So, initially, I wanted to make a prediction about the novel itself (which I’ve never read). I predicted that this novel is a gothic story and has very proper terms like “lady,” “sir,” and possibly “Captain” woven throughout its text. I predicted that it’s set in England in a city called “Wuthering Heights” and that it’s about a young woman who must choose a suitor. After making this prediction, I headed to Gutenberg and searched for the book I’ve wanted to read for such a long time.

I then selected the novel and clicked “Plain text” to get me to the next screen.

 

I copied all of that text and then pasted it into a google doc entitled “Wuthering Heights.”

I then when to Voyant-tools and pasted the novel once again, then hit the “Reveal” button to bring me to the next screen.

The system had now divided up the text into 10 segments by its words and phrases for me to see.

I clicked on phrases and was delighted to see that one of the most common phrases in the novel is “If you don’t let me in I’ll kill you.”

My initial prediction about what the novel was about seemed to be not as far off as I thought. Words like “master” and “mr” were very common in the novel, with the most common being “Catherine” and “Heathcliff,” who I would guess are the two main characters and possible love interests. That reading would put me closer to the idea of a lady picking a suitor, but with the common phrase being about “killing,” I might be off just a tad.

From these screens, I went on to try some of the tools:

• The trends tools allowed me to see the most common words and when they popped up in each segment of the novel. The word or name “linton” had the most dynamic trend of all the words, peaking and falling twice dramatically in the novel.

• The topics tool allowed me to see what words were often connected with the most common words in the novel, like “Heathcliff” in this picture. “Heathcliff” was most often paired with “Mr.” and “Mrs.”

• The textualarc tool gave a representation of the keywords and their frequency in the novel by having red lines represent how often they were used when hovered over by the mouse.

Some benefits of the tools: The tools allowed me to have visual representations of the most important phrases and words of the novel easily. They made the data more manageable and easily accessible than they would be in regular book form.

Some limitations of the tools: Some of the tools, like the textualarc, became too overloaded with information and this made the visual representation messy and hard to comprehend.

In conclusion, I think I’m going to read “Wurthering Heights.” I mean, if there’s anything this data’s shown me it’s that there’s “killing” in this novel and a character named “Mr. Heathcliff,” and that’s cool enough for me. Also, it was really interesting looking at a novel from its data, before even reading it. The key words, trends, and phrases that the Voyant-tool system picked up from the novel showed a lot about its main subjects, which seem to be the characters “Catherine” and “Heathcliff,” and how they interact like, “If you don’t let me in I’ll kill you.”

I also think these tools could be a great resource to any classroom or researcher. Teachers assigning book reports or research papers on novels or specific authors could provide these sites as key tools for students and researchers could use the sites for easy data access (they wouldn’t have to scrounge through entire novels, only just copy and paste it into the site instead).

-Sarah DeLena