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