I chose to experiment with Voyant and word tree for the text analysis praxis. I wanted to find a text that I was familiar with so that I could at least kind of understand what I was looking at. I went to Project Gutenberg to see if I could find a text that was available that I was familiar with. I was excited to find The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Project Gutenberg is an awesome resource that I enjoyed exploring and hope to continue to use in the future.

The first tool I used was Voyant. I liked the various charts that this tool produced and the ease of viewing/playing with the different visualizations.

Voyant – The Well of Loneliness

I didn’t think it was all that illuminating to see that “like”, “little”, and “said” were among the most used words. I was also unsure of how to read or manipulate the data in any meaningful way based on the initial output. But, once I played around a little bit things got more interesting. I decided that I would look at the main characters love interests throughout the novel and compare that to instances of of the word “longing”. I wanted to use the words “longing”, “longed”, “lonely”, but I could not figure out how to make them all into one category. I think if I had played around with the tool more I would have been able to figure that out. Based on the data “longing” was the word in this cluster used the most throughout the book, so I chose to use that word for my analysis.

Briefly, the novel follows Stephen, a lesbian in early 20th century England. Collins is her tutor (childhood), Angela a friend who she has a relationship with (adolescent/early 20s), and then Mary who is arguably the love of her life (adulthood). I think it’s interesting that Stephen’s feelings of longing are heightened when she is in a relationship. In the novel Stephen is obviously queer, she wears “mens” clothes, doesn’t marry, does traditionally masculine activites, etc. Whether it’s a symptom of the time or genuine attraction, Stephen dates feminine women who are often betrothed to men (Angela) or they face discrimination/a harder life, which prompts Stephen to push them away and into the arms of a man (Mary). I think you could extrapolate that these factors influence her feelings of longing.

The other tool I explored for this praxis was word tree. I really liked the interface and how the user interacted with the text. It was useful to have the full quote highlighted on the side of the page, which I think would be really useful for performing close readings of texts. This tool also seemed to capture the overall themes of the novel better than the Voyant analysis. As a fun little treat the results also read like poetry to me.

word tree – The Well of Loneliness