Addie - Data mining & quantifying literature

I think the most interesting part of using quantitative data with literature is that it can point out things we might not notice while reading normally. In “Quantifying Literature”, Jesse Rosenthal talks about using computers to add to traditional close reading, not replace it. One example that stood out to me was his analysis of Dickens’s use of words like “that” and “which.” There was enough of a pattern that he could roughly tell when a novel was written. I thought that was interesting because those are such ordinary words that I would never think twice about them while reading.

Using Voyant made me understand this idea a bit better. It can show repeated words, connections between terms, and where certain words appear throughout a text. But I also think you have to be careful with what you take away from those results. Just because a word appears a lot does not necessarily mean it is important. A word cloud or graph can show you that something is happening, but you still have to go back to the text to understand why. That connects to what I wrote about last week with information visualization. The visualization gives us another way of looking at something, but it doesn’t speak for itself.

I noticed this with The Daunt Diana. Some of the most frequent words Voyant found were “neave” (41), “daunt” (27), “little” (20), “collection” (20), and “things” (19). “Collection” and “things” stood out to me because much of the story centers on Neave’s relationship with the objects he collects. At the beginning, even his random little objects mean something to him because he found them himself and developed a connection to them. Later, when he finally gets the Daunt collection, he realizes that owning beautiful things isn’t enough to make them feel meaningful or personal to him.

I think that’s where Voyant is most useful for literary analysis. I wouldn’t want it to replace actually reading the text, but it can give you a place to start. In this case, Voyant made me pay more attention to how often collecting and objects come up, and then going back to the story helped me understand why that pattern matters.