Project 2: Distant Reading
Project 2: St. Distant Reading
St. Ronan’s Well
Sir Walter Scott
An Old World Landlady.
But to make up my tale,
She breweth good ale,
And thereof maketh sale.
Here is my journey through Voyant and distant reading:
To begin with I did not know exactly where to start, so I took the advice to just play around. I began with selecting single words with high counts to see how their frequency played out throughout the book. Next, I started clicking on multiple words to see how they related to each other frequency wise, and whether those frequencies matched up or not throughout the segments. The first word I really focused on was Mowbray, which I had a feeling had to do probably with the main characters. Next I was intrigued by the characters and tried to see how they matched up with each other, as well as with the term Mowbray. Most seem to be intertwined with each other. Not knowing where to go from there, I just started to look again at the words with the most counts, and one that stood out to me was brother. I chose to focus on this word for a while and try to figure out who was brothers with who. I discovered the character Clara Mowbray’s brother is John Mowbray, the Laird of St. Ronan’s. There is also another pair of characters that are related, Etherington (which I believe is a title) is the half-brother of Tyrrel.
I then decided to just play around with the other tools:
Here is Links (I had difficulty getting “said” out of the center).
I also tried out the ScatterPlot tool:
30 Words
50 Words
80 Words
Bubblelines was actually somewhat insightful. It looks like Clara is more involved with Tyrrel and Etherington throughout the book than she is with her brother John Mowbray. Also, all three have a higher word count and John may be less of a main character in the story than the other three.
John Tyrrel Clara Etherington
The Love Word
After I was done playing with some of the tools I continued to play around with the word count and frequencies of some words. One word I typed in was love and what I found was pretty interesting. The different forms of love that came up counted to a total of 113. These words are: love, loved, loves, lover, lovers, lovely, glove, beloved, love-letter, lady-love, love’s, love-intrigue, lovely-most, lover’s, well-beloved. Due to this list, it makes me think that Sir Ronan’s Well could be a love story. This prompted me to look up where love-letter comes up. I did not find much in regards to the love letter, besides that it comes about in segment 8. It did lead me to discover that the two brothers Etherington and Tyrrel are on quite unfriendly terms by this point in the book. This led me to look up the most common of these words “love”, and found there may be more than one love story in St. Ronan’s Well. I then typed in some more extravagant words such as death, mystery, and murder. When I typed in murder, it brought me to an interesting scene between Earl Etherington and Clara. Apparently he had been forbidden to be around her and so had his brother Tyrrel, but Clara had made an exception for Tyrrel. Etherington was quite upset about it, and throughout the scene was trying to persuade Clara to marry him, but she was determined not to. Throughout this scene he seems to be somewhat insane, and crazed about “having her,” to the extent that she was afraid he would murder Tyrrel. It turns out this brotherly dislike turned to pure hatred. Earlier passages had mad Etherington seem conniving, but now he seems quite mad. I have no idea who Clara prefers, or maybe she is not interested in either of them. I guess I’ll just have to read it eventually and find out.
Distant Reading vs. Close Reading
In the end, I believe I prefer close reading to distant reading. I spent half the time on Voyant unsure of what I was going for, and where it was taking me. I did not like not knowing the end result. All I wanted to know was what the story was about, what was happening, and what was going to happen. I just wanted to read the book. By going through different words and where they were in the text, and reading the context they were in; I was able to piece together what was going on. What I did enjoy doing; however, was playing with all of the different tools and finding the patterns between the words and characters. What I think would be an interesting experience, is taking some books one has read and submitting them all into Voyant and discern the patterns between all of them. Or even close reading the book first then doing distant reading using these tools after. Perhaps I am biased though. If I were more confidant in distant reading as I am with close reading, I may have a different outlook. Or if I knew where I wanted to go with my analysis, I would be more confidant in what I discovered. One thing is for sure though, I definitely want to read Sir Walter Scott’s St. Ronan’s Well. This assignment has definitely made me curious to find out if I was right or wrong in my analysis. And I would like to find out more of the context on the excerpts that I read through. Overall, I found this assignment to be beneficial, especially since distant reading will most likely be used more often in the future. I can also see Voyant and distant reading methods becoming a handy tool in my major as well. Anthropology is in the center of humanities and science, programs like Voyant will allow us to compare articles and studies from a range of similar or different anthropological themes. I am excited to put some of the articles I have read over the years into Voyant and see what comes up.