To start this week’s exercise, I decided to have a little fun. Kind of like stretching before a big work out. Using Google’s Ngram Viewer, I compared the heroine of my chosen text, Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet, to her modern-day counterpart, Bridget Jones, with whose diary we are intimately acquainted. Because Helen Fielding has openly admitted to basing her characters on Jane Austen’s—especially Mark Darcy on Mr. Darcy—I thought it would be interesting to see how else they compare. I was surprised to see how Miss Bennet’s popularity waned for so many years and then, at the turn of the century, increased and hasn’t stopped since.  Additionally, I was surprised to see that Bridget Jones’ popularity peaked higher than Elizabeth’s ever did.

Then onto the hard part of the work out—creating a definition for digital humanities. And not just any definition, one with strict boundaries. My humble result below.

Wordle vs. WordItOut

While I generally consider myself a hands-on learner and quick on the uptake when it comes to basic computer programs and technologies, I found this week’s exercise to be more than a little frustrating. Wordle would not allow me to insert the Project Gutenberg (or any other) link to get my word output, which resulted in me copying and pasting the book in its entirety into the “Paste in a bunch of text” box. Oh, I pasted in a bunch of text alright! Finally, I got this beauty:

Then it was time for WordItOut, which was a much quicker task after figuring out Wordle’s quirks.

I actually took the time to try to make the two look as similar as possible in coloring for easier comparison. I think Wordle has WordItOut beat in basic aesthetics, but otherwise the results were nearly identical. I was very surprised to see “Mr.” was the word most used throughout Pride and Prejudice. Despite being the nineteenth century’s chick-lit by a female author, it is clear that it was still a man’s world at the time of writing and publication. However, the word “Elizabeth” does run a close second, which is a bit refreshing.

Up-Goer Five Text Editor

Next up, the commonality of words. It appears things haven’t changed much in 200 years since Miss Austen put pen to paper. In fact, other than proper names, only four words she used were not in the top 1000 words of Up-Goer Five: indeed, pleasure, till, and manner. However, this made me curious what the results would be if basic words like came, made, most, and go were not allowed to be analyzed. I was surprised at pleasure being so widely used. It’s not a word I hear used often, and it seems the connotation has changed over the years.

CLAWS

CLAWS was my least favorite of all the sites. To me, it did not lay out the results in a clear, easy-to-read manner. It was also counterintuitive that the key wasn’t listed on the same page as the results, so that you had to toggle back and forth between pages. Additionally, this seems more like it would be useful for grade school children learning grammar than it would be for any other purpose.

TAPoR

When it came to TAPoR, I wasn’t nearly as interested in the HyperPo abilities as I was with the program’s ability to run lists of words and compile how many times each word occurs in the text. The word “Elizabeth,” which appeared to be a close second to “Mr.” in the Wordle, is actually used 200 times less than “Mr.” Futhermore, I was particularly interested in the listing ability for two reasons. First, Stephen Ramsay writes extensively on the tf-idf formula and how its findings affect critics when looking for patterns in a text, which I found intriguing. Second, in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, a character tries to categorize and determine the genre of books based solely on the words that recur and appear the most in a given work. It’s an interesting thought, trying to decide what a book is about without having read it for its sentences, but for the words it features.

While all of these sites were fun to play with and produced interesting results, I think they ultimately take away from the true meaning of what a book is hoping to convey. Making a book a thing of quantitative results removes the reader’s ability to interpret the text for himself and to engage in the nuances the author has created with grammar, punctuation, and voice. The only work that comes to mind that would benefit from these results would be Gertrude Stein’s “Portraits and Repetition,” where her goal is to use the same words as many times and in as many ways as possible. As Ramsay himself writes:

“It is one thing to notice patterns of vocabulary, variation in line length, or images of darkness and light; it is another thing to employ a machine that can unerringly discover every instance of such features across a massive corpus of literary texts and then present those features in a visual format entirely foreign to the original organization in which these features appear” (Ramsay 16).

I couldn’t agree more. Just as Project Gutenberg states that anything may be done with a public domain text, which may result in the text being changed in ways that dissolve its power and purpose, stripping it to just its words changes it too.