For this week’s blog post, I selected a short excerpt from one of my favorite plays, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. The passage I chose is taken from Act 1, wherein a character named Lucky is asked to think for the entertainment of three other characters; the resulting gibberish is arguably one of the strangest and most difficult to understand monologues in recorded history, right on par with the famous internet phrase “Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?”.
I used Wordle to create a word cloud using the entirety of Lucky’s monologue. When analyzed, I feel that this visualization accurately conveys the surrealism and bizarre nature of the passage. Some of the largest words are “reasons”, “unknown”, “skull”, and “tennis”. It was sounding pretty existential and deep right up to tennis, right? If you look closer, one can see proper nouns, such as, “Connemara”, “Testew”, and “Cunard”; I have no clue what these are in reference to, both in the context of the play and the visualization. This is an example of why I feel this visualization is so successful. One thing that this visualization fails in is the fact that common words such as “the” and “and” are omitted. I acknowledge that I made the choice to omit these words, so as to see the subjects of the speech; however, in omitting the common words, one loses the style of the passage, which is littered with excessive iterations of “the” and “and” (“the” alone is used 73 times in the 700 word passage!).
Overall, I would assert that this distant reading visualization succeeds more than it fails in creating an accurate representation of the passage I chose to analyze. I feel that a visualization tool that created a word cloud that simultaneously gave demonstration of the style would be very useful for texts such as the one I chose, if it existed.