dgst101 Cierra Dawn

For this module my goal was to find a digital tool or tools that could help me solve an answer to a question of my choosing. My question was, How do computers assist in analyzing literary text? firstly, to understand this question you need to know what text analysis is. Text analysis is the process of examining and interpreting written text to gain insights and extract useful information. It involves using various techniques and algorithms to analyze the structure, content, and context of text data. The significance of my question is that it allows us to conduct comparative analysis across different text, authors, and time periods. In addition, it allows us to uncover hidden patterns and themes that may not be immediately evident to the human eye. What I did for this project was take a book that I have read, The Tale of Genji, and a book that I have not read, The Death of Woman Wang, and compare the two through a text analysis tool. The tool that I used was called Voyant, which you could copy and paste text in or type text in and it will generate a picture, graph, words per sentence, most frequently used words, vocabulary density, and the readability index. The product that I hoped to produce was a compare and contrast of the two books and to see how text analysis worked in understanding different writings. What I did was I typed in a paragraph from each book then let Voyant generate the break down of the text. Some similarities that I found between the two books was the vocabulary density and the readability index. Which did surprise me because both of the books are from the Ancient Chinese era, but The Tale of Genji was written in the 11th century. Whereas the Death of Woman Wang was not published until 1978. In the graphs however the relative frequencies were very different as well as common words used, and average words per sentence. I think that Voyant was a great tool and was very helpful in breaking down the two authors writing style. My findings were that when computers analyze literary text they can help us see various aspects of the text. For example. they can help identify the main themes and topics discussed in the text. Also they can analyze the language and writing style used by the author. The question I did receive was, what inspired me to do this project ? My inspiration came from the love that I have for reading, so I was curious to see how different authors have similar or different writing styles. I was most curious to dive into the discovery of information that we do not think to look at when we read, and isn’t usually seen by the human eye. I am most proud that I successfully was able to find such a great tool to break down text and my compare and contrast of the two novels. It is great to discovery something new and push yourself to do something out of your comfort zone.

http://www.voyant-tools.org/