Project2: To read or not to read “The Professor” by Charlotte Bronte… I’ll go with not to read.
My feelings towards this project have been on a roller coaster ride. When we were first instructed to read Paul Fyfe’s article on distant reading and the experiment/project he did with his class, I thought he made a very smart decision as a teacher to assign that. It was an immersive and interactive assignment and, from his student’s reactions, it turned out to be fun. Because we were supposed to read Fyfe’s article in relation to our own project, I was really excited to tackle making this thing called a word cloud (I had never used one before although I had seen them) and get started! Then, as we discussed the project more in class my excitement waned and stress took over. How in the world were we supposed to deduce what the storyline was from about 20 or so of the most frequently used words? Not the most important, mind you, the most frequently used. Obviously, “the”, “a”, “an”, “and”, etc were all supposed to be ignored, but then were supposed to use our super SUPER sleuthing skills to take an educated guess as to what the story we weren’t supposed to read was about. I don’t know about everyone else, but I don’t like making educated guesses and especially not when I have so little information to go off of. I know the point of this project was not to be “right”, but to just have fun, embrace the fun of creating word clouds, and maybe get carried away with making your own story out of the words you’re given, and I eventually relinquished my desire to correctly guess what “The Professor” was actually about. It just took a little wrestling with my inner book-loving demons. I love understanding the whole story of a book, all the characters, the descriptions, the dialogue, I love actually reading books. But this project really brought out the creative side of me that had been buried behind the “too-bogged-down-with-school-and-life-to-have-fun” Jenna. Needless to say.. it became quite fun.
My adventure into distant reading and word clouds started with gutenberg.org. Thank goodness for the internetz and being able to find a whole copy of the books we chose to not read. Otherwise, this new way of “reading” wouldn’t be possible. So I copied and pasted the necessary text into voyant-tools.org and voila!! A bunch of filler words that I can’t use at all jump out at me. After some tweaking with the stop words list and creating my own custom one, I narrowed my word cloud down to a bunch of random words that make a little more sense instead, and I get to work!
Sleuthing skills, activate! Two of the top ten words used in “The Professor” are “her” and “my”. Right off the bat, this lets me know that the story is told from a first-person vantage point, otherwise there would be no need for the word “my” to be used so much. “Her” indicates that a women is a main part of the story, which is backed up by the fact that “she” is used just a little less frequently at 864 times. Then there is the word “you”, used at 857 times I can deduce that the narrator is directing the story towards someone, whether it’s a woman or a man I don’t know yet. “Me” is used 747 times, which means the narrator is personally involved in whatever is being told to “you”. At 589 times used, the word “he” gives me the impression that “The Professor” may be a story about a love triangle between the narrator, a woman, and a man.
After I’d drawn what conclusions I could from the smaller filler words of the story, I moved on to the bigger, more important frequently used words. These include “little”, “like”, “monsieur”, “thought”, “time”, “hunsden”, “know”, “frances”, “english”, “Mdlle” (which means mademoiselle), “Mr”, and “crimsworth”. Because of the possibility of a man and a woman as prominent characters in the story, “monsieur”, “Mdlle”, and “Mr” make sense and would support the idea that these characters are important. After this, I’m at a slight loss as to why “little”, “like”, “thought”, “hunsden”, “know”, “frances”, “english”, and “crimsworth” would be frequently used. “Time” is always an important aspect in any story, so the frequent usage of it in this story also makes sense. At this point, I have the thought that “The Professor” is actually a letter the narrator has written to someone. “Time” would be a relevant word to use if the narrator were writing to a man or woman about a past together, or the past of those in the possible love triangle. So I look up “hunsden” and low and behold that happens to be a last name. “Crimsworth” is also a last name. I figured that whoever has the last names of Hunsden and Crimsworth are major characters in the story and may even be part of the mysterious love triangle, which means they could even be enemies fighting for the love they both share. “Frances” is most commonly used as a first name and could be the first name of either a man or woman, one more possible point of the love triangle? Now the words I have yet to discover the relevancy of are “little”, “like”, “thought”, “know”, and “english”. Because I know “hunsden”, “crimsworth”, and “frances” are names, I figure “english” means the nationality of the characters and/or the setting of the story is England. Furthermore, because I am under the suspicion that “The Professor” is a letter written by the narrator to someone, “like”, “thought”, and “know” sound like thinking words. Whoever the narrator is probably wrote out their thoughts, whether they thought something or knew something or liked something. The final word that I had trouble understanding was “little”, even though it was the most frequently used word that had any significant meaning. So I turned to the Word Trends line graph and it showed that “little” is barely used at all in the first quarter of the book, and then fluctuates between high and medium usage for the rest of the story. All I can think of is that the narrator likes to focus on the little aspects within the story, the little things that may make certain parts more important.
By the end of this project, I must say I was quite excited to have completed it. Although I’m still a little baffled as to the meaning of using the word “little” so often, being able to come up with my own interpretations of what the storyline is was very engaging and seriously fun! I would love to do this project again as maybe a challenge to our reasoning and creativity skills by seeing how closely we can deduce the story to the original. In fact, I’m curious, so I’m going to start reading Charlotte Bronte’s “The Professor” and see how well I did. Thanks for the awesome project Professor Whitson!