Jaedyn - Data mining & quantifying literature

 In all honesty, I don’t enjoy distant reading and can’t find any real use in it for small scale, college projects and papers. When practicing with “The Nose” in Voyant Tools, I could tell you very little about the plot. I got a sense for the time period but that was about it. Now that I have close read and distant read “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe, I found it easier going into the distant read knowing what the story was about. It helped me better interpret the information presented in Voyant tools but still, I feel the information wasn’t too useful for me. I was able to pick out the eerie and gothic wording as well as see trends between the words used within the text and the formatting of the story. But I also feel I could have picked all of this out on my own.

After reading “Quantifying Literature”, I feel I have a slightly better understanding of how distant reading can be used. I find it interesting and cool that he was able to pick up on trends in Dicken’s works and determine the time it was written based on these distant reading tools. I could see the use in this way, especially if it is shared with the general public to help place all of the works in their perspective years. But on a smaller scale, I don’t see the use in personal projects and analyzing works as a college student. I am interested to see what my group and I can discover within the works of Poe. I hope we can find some similarities across his frequently used phrases and words. I know we could definitely analyze his interesting use of punctuation and hope Voyant tools can help us pick that out of our texts.

I enjoy the visuals used in Voyant tools. The word cloud is an interesting element to analyze, and I found myself using the word tree a lot when analyzing my short story for class. I found it interesting the way Poe connects words and adds dramatization to his stories. But still, I find close reading better for analyzing these factors.