The ten topics I have are murder, travel, house, description, religion, divorce, schedule, job, investigation, and performance. While graphing the topics on google fusion tables I put topics like murder and investigation together in one chart to show the correlations between the two and how one rises while the other falls or stays the same. I tried to put together for the most part topics that were similar and would show an interesting relation to one another. I also looked up historical events or the times that certain Holmes stories were published to further analyze what was happening in the graph.

Murder v.s. Investigation

  While looking at the spike of investigation at around 1891 I started to search for murders around 1891. Although I came up short I did realize that Jack the Ripper, a killer who stabbed at least five prostitutes and mutilated four in London, was never really identified although they had several suspects they couldn’t pin point it to one man. While reading about this it came to me that investigation could be at a peak because from 1888 till about 1892 they were investigating and trying to identify this killer. Another chilling discovery was Johann Otto Hoch who was a German con man who claimed up to 50 victims possibly more. I also think he could be the reason investigation spiked because from 1888 till about 1891 he couldn’t be found then he was and in 1906 he was hanged. I believe the reason while investigation and murder correlate so well is that when murder occurs investigation peaks because they are trying to find the murderer, but when murder peaks investigation slowly rises because it is just beginning. This link shows Jack the Ripper as well as Johann Otto Hoch and what I was describing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_before_1900.

Divorce v.s. Religion

I searched very rigorously to find any correlation with religion and divorce online, but what I did find was that divorce rates in England increased and decreased, but not drastically, and stayed in the same range for the most part.http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-rates-marriage-ons is the link I used to find the divorce rates. What I could theorize is, some people that were married by the time they reached their thirties which was about the age you divorced found that they had different religious ideals than their husband. Another theory is that around this time period money could of been an issue with the end of world war one, and peoples husbands either dying or have become disable now are falling on tough times and need money or will simply divorce their husband.

Performance v.s. Schedule

I didn’t know how two relate the two other than when you watch a performance you put it in your schedule but when I dove deeper into what could be the relation between the two I saw so much more. What noticed was that when I went to England recently I noticed that the theater district in the west end was so elaborate with many different shows and as I dove deeper I realized England has been doing theater since the 1700’s. In this link it shows all theater shows form the 1700’s to 2010 in England: http://www.guidetomusicaltheatre.com/london_shows_chronology/1700s-on.html. I also realized that at the peak of the scheduling line (in the graph) it was in 1893. The Holmes story the resident patient came out and it deals with a lot of scheduling jargon which could also be why scheduling peaked around that time. http://www.angelfire.com/ks/landzastanza/publication.html.

House v.s. Description

While reading through some of the Sherlock Holmes stories I noticed that a lot of descriptions relate to house hold items or are in a house which correlated to the rises on the house line in the graph. I also put together that the reason these are so close together on the graph is because they go hand in hand.

Travel v.s. Job

While looking at this graph I noticed that travel peaks a lot. The reason I think it goes up is because a lot of people in England have to travel to get anywhere whether it be taking the tube, or a carriage. While I was in London I noticed everything revolved around transportation which could be the reason for the peak. Also transportation and jobs go hand in hand because in order to get to your job you need to take some mode of transportation.

The ten topics I initially chose were: crime, case solving, observation, economy, body, morning/night, appearance, passing of time, written documents, and setting.

First, I decided to compare the topics of crime and case solving. There seemed to be a dramatic increase in the appearance of crime from 1894 to 1904. Upon looking back at the topic index, I found that the largest prevalence of crime was in The Adventure of the Second Stain, which was published in late 1904. Indeed, a decade after the original Adventures appeared in The Strand, a series of others were published known as The Return of Sherlock Holmes. The appearance of both crime and case solving varied throughout 1904, and while dipping over or under each other, they remained close until 1927.

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The first graph I did was comparing the topics of Money, Security/Protection and Detective. The clearest spike is for Security/Protection in June of 1904, historically I could not find anything that was happening at this time to explain this. There was a war involving and other small conflicts but nothing that could directly be pinpointed.  I then turned to Sherlockian-Sherlock.com to see what exact story was published at this time and the story is “The Adventure of Three Students.” The topics of money and detective also spike around this time which would lead one to think that the story mentions all three of those topics.  There is a spike with both security and money at the same time which is September 1917, which is due to the publishing of the story “His Last Bow”

This next graph surprised me a little. I wasn’t sure if there would be much of a relationship between the topics of money and room descriptions but surprisingly the two topics seem to move together along the graph in unison. Aside from money peaked around 1925 and room description does not they basically peak at the same times. One again I had trouble finding anything historical that explained this. They both peaked in 1904 and as I said earlier nothing too significant happened in 1904 that would affect these topics. There were some wars and what not but nothing related to rooms or money.  I once again looked at the Sherlock stories themselves using the same website. Money peaks in March 1904 but there were no Sherlock stories published during this month and room descriptions peaked during June which again is “The Adventure of the Three Students.”

This graph did not surprise as much because I assumed the topics of face/head and appearance would move together and I also figured that relationship was closely related to those two. The peaked of both relationships and face/head can be contributed to the story “The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk” The story is about brothers and talks about family resemblance with could attribute the face/head part and because it is about brothers discussing the family relations can account for the relationships topic.

This graph it was a little easier to find history to understand the peaks. There is a slight peak for time in September of 1908 and I believe this is because of information I found on semicolonblog.com that states that a German mathematician was the first person to ever define time as the fourth dimension in September of 1908. There is also a very noticeable peak in travel around 1908 and I believe there could be two reasons for this. According to inventors.com in 1908 Henry Ford improves the assembly lines for cars, and the Hydrofoil boat was invented. I was surprised that travel did peak in 1903 when the plane was invented but instead it actually had a low in that year.

 For this graph the travel peaks are obliviously the same as the last graph. I thought comparing the two would work because I thought that as travel improved writing especially letters may also improve since there was better transportation for sending of those letters and the two topics are not too far off in the graph.  I could not find a reason for writing peak when it did so it may once again relate to the Sherlock stories alone. I’m not too sure.

Overall, I found topic modeling and graphing to be a bit difficult and I feel that personally I was not able to see anything new about the stories or the topics because of the graphs. I think maybe in different situations topic modeling would be more useful but I had a tough time with it.

Welcome to my topic modeling project! Throughout my research as to find some trends for these three different graphs, I have come across some rather interesting finds. Much like a topic modeling project we had reviewed in class, I was really interested in the historical aspects that may have inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to include certain topics within his many stories. Here we go!

Writing

The first topic that I created was Writing, with three subcategories : Stationary/paper products, secret letters and sending mail.

If we look at the left-hand side of my graph, we can see that all three topics had a huge spike around 1903 – so that year was the one that I searched around for.

According to The New York Times’ archive named “On This Day,” in Sept. of 1903, a cartoon of a “major post office scandal” was published in Harper’s Weekly, exposing some violations that a prior story had touched upon in March of the same year of a corrupt post master in the United States. I’m not certain if this would have any effect on Doyle’s work being that he was in a different country, but news travels fast – especially about scandals.

Speaking of scandals, I found a rather interesting English scandal that relates to the topic with the highest peak – secret letters.

I stumbled upon an original Daily Mail UK article that provided “never before seen” photos of Edward VII’s mistress – a woman named Lillie Langtry. According to a caption underneath one of her photos, “Langtry was a regular in high society- and counted Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle as close friends.” Ah, such a small detail to this particular article, but a huge win in terms of my topic model research! If he in fact was friends with this woman, I’m sure that her scandalous personal relationship with a married man was an inspiration for his writing, hence why “Secret Letters” would be the largest peak on this graph.
Here are the topics that were covered under my “Secret Letter” classification, for reference:

word men american message words english short picture affair change give single letters copy criminal figures meaning agony dancing hilton

Langtry was English, as well as Edward; they had an affair; and she eventually immigrated to America following their secret romance. Coincidence? (I hope not, because that is a pretty interesting find if I do say so myself!)

According to the article, “Langtry is rumoured to have been the inspiration for the character of Irene Adler in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tale, A Scandal In Bohemia.”

Crime

Now, onto a rather complicated looking graph on crime! This graph is divided up into four different topics: homicide investigation, house fire/arson, stabbing and detective. There are about four different peaks on this graph between the end of 1903 and October of 1904 – and I was out to see if there were any reasons behind this, aside from the possibility of them peaking due to publication date. Here are my findings:

I wasn’t really even sure where to start with this, so I began with a general Google search of “1903 crime UK.” I then stumbled upon a WikiPedia page on gun control laws in the United Kingdom – one of which involved the pistol in 1903. From there, I left Wiki and searched “1903 Pistol Act UK” and found a VERY helpful resource page that may in fact show why there was a prevalence of crime, homicide and police activity around the time where a gun control law was placed into effect. Gun violence must have had to happened prior to that in order to instigate an act to control guns in the first place.

According to the Dunblane Resource sheet, the act required that each gun be registered and not be carried by a minor or felon. As we know, most criminals do not follow rules – so maybe this is why there’s an influx in all of the categories in my topic model.

Another huge, famous inspiration that we may also be able to connect to “homicide investigations” being the largest of all peaks in 1903, would be that “Jack the Ripper” was indicted and put to death on April 7, 1903.

Physical Descriptions

After a bit of intense research on scandal and crime, we are brought to my final topic modeling graph of physical appearances. This was a bit softer topic where it was in turn a bit harder for me to find connections. The trends weren’t very in sync with one another. Apparel peaks high twice, around 1891-1892. This was the section of years that consisted of the collection “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” officially published in 1892. Due to the sheer subject matter of the stories, I can make an inference that descriptions of people’s apparel spiked up here due, in fact, to the publishing of the stories themselves.

Well folks, there you have my take on topic modeling with graphs! Thanks for reading.