Summary

The most frequently occurring animal in Aesop’s Fables is the lion. The lion is seen as representing power and force which is often juxtaposed with the fox who is seen as clever and funny. These are some of the themes derived from a textual analysis of Aesop Fables using Voyant as the digital tool.
Voyant is an online digital tool used to perform text analysis on literary text such as digitized books, poetry, speeches etc. Voyant doesn’t require downloading, or even signing up to perform textual analysis. It is preferable that the body of work or corpus is in the form of text. Fortunately, I was able to locate and download a digitized book on Aesop Fables from the website gutenberg.org. This site allows you to peruse numerous digitized books, and then save and download the book in a text format.
Before I did my Aesop Fable analysis with Voyant I decided to play around a bit with the tool. When you first see the tool, it looks uncomplicated. You have the option of opening one of their text files or uploading your own text file. The tool has three corpuses in their inventory, “Shakespeare’s plays” , “Austen’s novels” and “Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein”. I opened Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and then the magic started. A screen with five distinct partitions appears. The cirrus screen with the most frequent words found in the novel. These words are proportional to their frequency in the text. Larger words means that a particular word appears more often. The words in the cirrus screen exclude certain words that are not meaningful to analyzing the text. The second partition is the reader. This is essentially the text that you are analyzing. You can search in this screen for words of interest and it will be highlighted in the text. The next partition is the Trends section. In this section there is a line graph that plots the relative frequency of the most relevant words on the y axis and on the x axis is a ten point segmentation of the document. The document is segmented by the total number of words divided by 10 and each segment shows the frequency of a word. The fourth partition is the summary. This section gives a summary snapshot of the text measurements such as the average word per sentence, the readability index and the most frequent occurring words in the corpus. The final section is the Context section. Here you get a snippet of the context in which the relevant words appear. The context gives the words coming before the main word and the words coming after the main word. It is important to point out that within these five partitions there are additional tools that allow you to further manipulate and customize the sections. It’s fun to play around with the different sections to see what you can do.
Aesop lived in Greece between 500 and 600 BC. It was believed that he was a slave but very little is known about him. He wrote these timeless fables that a lot of us are familiar with such as “The Fox and Grapes”. When I was a kid, my mom used to read them to me. I still have a book I bought years ago with some of his fables. These fables have social, political and moral themes running through them and Aesop used mostly animals to convey themes that are relevant to humans such as honesty, justice, truth etc.
When I came across a digitized book that contained Aesop fables, I was curious to see if there were any patterns or trends that I can pull from them. The most common word in the analysis was said, which is not surprising most of Aesop stories are short and they are usually have characters engaging in dialogue. So, it makes sense for words like replied asked and said used to convey dialogue are part of the cirrus output. The most frequently occurring character animals are the lion, fox wolf, man and dog. This is reflected in the summary encapsulated in the following table.
Word Frequency
said 290
lion 126
fox 115
ass 111
time 107
man 105

The most commonly occurring animals are the lion and fox which both have the highest frequency in the in the 9th segment. Meanwhile the ass has the highest in the 7th while man had the highest in the 4th. I’m not sure if there is anything noteworthy with this trend but I do wonder if the fox and lion share the same segment because they are in fables together a lot. It is interesting that when I looked at the word lion it is associated with, words such as ferocious and beast. The lion is also a symbol for power and seriousness so that when he is defeated either by man or other animals you see words like brave and triumphant surrounding that character. You also find words like coward in context with the lion but ironically it is not applied to the lion rather to animals that attempt to challenge the lion some way. It is as if challenging the lion is a rite of passage to show you are brave. Characterization of the fox from the context clues include such words as sly, brains, amused, scoundrel and shameless and easily annoyed. The fox seems to be the type of character that finds amusement from tricking others and thinking he is smarter, but he also gets easily annoyed when things don’t go his way. The ass is seen as the working beast who is seen as foolish but hardworking. Man is seen as double face, traitor, untrustworthy and the wolf is always just hungry and trying to prey on the shepherd lamb or sheep. In sum a lot of these tropes that you read about regarding these animals recur in much of Aesop fables.