Spring 2015 Blog

Category for all blog posts for Spring 2015

Google Ngrams Project: Jane Austen vs. Mary Shelley

~ Annie Swafford

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For the Google Ngrams project, I chose the authors Jane Austen and Mary Shelley.  Jane Austen was born in 1775, however, her novels of romance were not widely known or successful during her time, therefore, they started to really gain popularity after 1869 and her reputation completely skyrocketed in the 20th century.  Moreover, Mary Shelley was also an English writer and she is best known for the horror novel Frankenstein.

There was a rise in the graph for Jane Austen around 1811 because that was when her novel Sense and Sensibility was published.  However, during this time there was a fall in Mary Shelley’s graph because she had not written any novels yet.  Then around 1820, we see a rise in the graph for Mary Shelley due to the fact that her most famous novel, Frankenstein was published and became popular.  However, Jane Austen had a fall during this time because she had not written anything because in the year 1817 she passed away.  Around 1830, there is rise in the graph for Jane Austen because in 1832, publisher Richard Bentley purchased the remaining copyrights to all of Austen’s novels and, beginning in around December 1832 and January 1833, published them in five illustrated volumes as part of his Standard Novels series.  Mary Shelley and Jane Austen remain pretty stagnant after 1840 because they were not publishing anything because Jane Austen had died quite a few years before and Mary Shelley would do the same around 1851.

After the year 1870 begins, we start to see rise in the graph for Jane Austen because during this year Jane Austen’s nephew, James, publishes his memoirs entitled A Memoir of the Life of Jane Austen and with this publication we see Jane Austen’s life and her works brought to a greater audience, which solidifies her place in literary history.  From then on, her popularity continues to soar and continues to be more popular than Mary Shelley.  Mary Shelley, on the other hand, for years of remaining stagnant has a rise in the graph around 1882 and I am not completely sure why.

Overall, it is interesting to see the rises and falls on this graph between these two famous authors.  It also fascinates me that these writers became famous not during their lifetime but rather after their death.

The Dawn of Evolution and its Rise.

~ Annie Swafford ~ 1 Comment

We all know Charles Darwin, the man who crafted the theory of evolution, one of the most controversial topics that have shaped modern science.  Whether you like it or not he told us that we share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, I hope you fall with the group that thinks it’s cool or really doesn’t care, since chimps are actually quite intelligent and can be capable of sign language (don’t dismiss them as dumb monkeys because maybe in a thousands years they may rule the earth).  Evolution has caused a huge rift within the world as creationism was thought to be the reason for our origin.  Religion was a big part of everyone’s life and when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution’s use skyrocketed within the year.

In the Ngrams there is one very interesting trend in both the examples. Capitalization will alter your results drastically.  This is especially important for names as “charles darwin” has a low result compared to “Charles Darwin,” even “Evolution” and “evolution” come up with different results.

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Even after On the Origin of Species was published, Darwin’s name has not seen too much of an increase in use until about 1880.  It has however seen a small upward trend after his second book on evolutionary theory, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex was published in 1871. The biggest increase of the use of his name came after his death on April 19th, 1882.

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We should call this contraction the charles darwin! Quick! We need to patent this!

 

Evolution however, has seen its usage grow and grow for many decades as scientists, philosophers and other scholars have become interested in the topic and started researching it themselves.  It is important to keep in mind that the evolution has many different definitions but its rise seems to be no coincidence however, as from 1859 the graph looks almost like the stock market in the roaring twenties.  My comparison isn’t too far fetched as towards 1900, evolution shows a sharp decrease.  Maybe discussion of evolution has started to subside, but it wasn’t too long before the Supreme Court of Tennessee will increase usage of the word to denote humans evolving.

Communication Through Time: Telegraph vs. Telephone

~ Annie Swafford

Something that particularly interests me is modes of communication throughout the ages. From the 19th century through today, we experienced huge advances in technology that helped to sculpt the way we live in this day and age. Two of the biggest forms of communication that arose during the Victorian era were the telegraph and the telephone, which I decided to compare for this assignment.

graphI was surprised at my Ngram chart results because I was expecting there to be a much bigger rise in the telephone from the time it was invented in 1876. Though it did receive wide popularity before 1900, I thought it was interesting to see that the telegraph still exceeded it by a significant amount by the end of the century.

The telegraph’s mentions begin before 1800, when the electric telegraph was first being developed. But its growth begins in 1830, when Samuel Morse perfected this invention for long distance communication with the help of his system called Morse Code. The telegraph became quickly accepted by the public as a faster way of sending and receiving information. Its rise continued consistently as it came into use all around the world until around 1860, when the first transcontinental telegraph line was cerated. This sparked a jump in the chart as telegraph’s came into use worldwide. Something I also noticed was after the telephone was invented, you still see the telegraph going up, but it’s not as consistent anymore and you see more drops in the graph.

In 1876, when the telephone was invented, it automatically made a significant jump in the amount of times it was mentioned in texts, as you see a slight fall in the telegraph. The telephone came into wide use very quickly, with around 10,000 telephones in service by 1878. In the 1880’s, the telephone continues its upward climb with the development of long distance service from the Bell Telephone Company, which was the only telephone company at the time. In the 1890’s, independent phone companies began to pop up all around, giving the Bell Company competition and also supporting the continuous rise of the telephone.

I also wanted to see when exactly the telephone became more popular than the telegraph. In 1900, the telephone’s book mentions skyrocket and exceed that of the telegraph by 1905, a huge jump in just 5 short years. Since then, the telephone has almost continuously risen until modern years while the telegraph has continuously fallen to almost 0% on the Ngram chart.

Overall, I thought it was interesting to see how the amount of mentions in books and texts correlate to popularity. I was surprised to see that mentions of the telephone didn’t rise over that of the telegraph until 1905 because its usage grew so quickly in such a short amount of time. But since the telegraph was so common and prevalent in that society, it took awhile for it to lose that popularity, something that still happens all the time with technology today.

Mini- Project Ngram Comparison

~ Annie Swafford

Poetic vs poetic

The words that I had wanted to compare was Poetic and poetic. I chose these words because I wanted to see how often this word was being use to describe various people ,if there was a relationship, and when the word began to gain traction.

Starting with my results on the graph, you don’t see much of a difference until about the mid-1830s where poetic, with a lowercase, is being used more often, about four times more often at which point, around 1883 it begins to  skyrocket and it is used 5x more than Poetic, with an uppercase. In 1838, Charles Dickens works such as “Oliver Twist” was written and it explains the reason for the increase in the use of that word during that time period. The skyrocket in the 1880s can be attributed to other famous works such as “King Solomon’s Mines”, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, and of course “Sherlock Holmes”.

Based on this research, you are able to infer that if a piece of work comes out during a certain year, that turns out to be a worldwide phenomenon, it will be searched more due to it being a cultural phenomenon, regardless of how brief a time. This represents a positive correlation and evident cause and effect between popularity and search terms. I believe that if a piece of poetry comes out in a few years that has the same impact on our generation this effect will be the same.

I believe that there is such a difference because poetic (lowercase) was used more as an adjective to describe the people who were living around that era. Looking at the data you are also able to tell that the word became more culturally acceptable and began to be used a lot more throughout this time period.

Victorian Medicine for Women

~ Annie Swafford ~ 1 Comment

One of my favorite short stories is The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It was first published in 1892. In the haunting narrative, Gilman critiques common medical practices for women affected by  things such as “hysteria” and “neurasthenia” after childbirth. My sources for the information are scattered throughout this post as links.

The common treatment of the time was the “rest cure.” It left the woman tethered to a bed with no means to express herself, writing or otherwise.. This supposedly promoted healthy blood flow, and removal from too much stimulation. It’s now widely recognized as a load of junk, a part of a largely misogynistic tradition that controlled women’s bodies. Nevertheless, Doctor Silas Weir Mitchell and his bed rest cure has a solidified place in literature, women’s health, and history.

Based on the story, and my slight interest in the subject matter, I chose to look at the terms “apothecary,” “hysteria,” and “neurasthenia” on the Oxford English Dictionary.

Google Chart
Hopefully zoom works well here..

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A new view of great Victorian writers

~ Annie Swafford

Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville are three Victorian authors that particularly interest me. The choice of settings to search for them on Ngram Viewer was simple, then. My single concern was using capital letters, as I was searching for people’s names and limit the period of time from 1800 to 1900.

According to the resulting graphic, the three writers are not mentioned until 1833, as they were really young and starting their careers. Poe was born in 1809, Dickens was born in 1812 and Melville in 1819. Dickens started submitting his sketches of the life in London to magazines in 1833. It is exactly the year that the graphic shows that he started to be more mentioned, a movement that continued increasing till 1871. A suggestion for the relative decrease in the graph at this time in his death on June 8, 1870. He left an unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  It has already started to be published in a serial form since April 1870. Analyzing the graphic, we can consider that Charles Dickens died on the top of his career. Since 1877, we can verify a new growth in his “popularity”. In this year, a book called The works of Charles Dickens was published and may be the reason to this new growth.

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In the case of Herman Melville, we can see that he has been more mentioned during the 1840s. It may be related to his trips over the sea, that gave him the material for four books in addition to Moby Dick. However, this novel that would be his great success, was not received well at the time because of its unusual combination of “whaling lore” and metaphysical themes. This may be the reason of his relatively low popularity over the 19th century, compared to Charles Dickens.

Edgar Allan Poe had a brief life – he died on October 7, 1849, before he has started to be more mentioned, according to Ngram Viewer. The graphic shows a special increase in Poe’s mentions over the 1870s. The reason may be the biographies and other works about him that have been published since 1870.

Word Cloud- Speckled Band

~ Annie Swafford

While reading “The Speckled Band” I noiteced many things that Holmes does to try to get the reader, thinking as to what the answer to the mystery is. In this story a snake goes from a ventilator on a rope to another room where after many nights of landing on this person will eventually bite them and kill them. Holmes repeats numerous times that the bell rope was a dummy rope. With the constant repition you begin to think the rope plays a role in the mystery. Also Holmes talks about the ventilator many times bringing you to think something went through that ventilator, as a reader I assumed it was some sort of poisonous gas, but I soon realized Holmes would repeat other abnormalities that would imideatly change my thinking. Holmes would repeat that there was a small milk saucer in the room hinting at some sort of pet that Dr. Roylotts had. In general, Holmes repeats certain details of the mystery as he is solving it to help us the readers solve it ourselves. You could say the theme Holmes sticks with here is repeating the strange coincidences leaving it up to us to piece them together. Reading it for the second time and looking for key words or repetitive phrases I was  able to piece the story together much faster. As I tried using word cloud for the first time I did struggle with how to make it stand out or match what I was trying to portray with it. For the first one I did a black background to represent the mystery took place at night, I made sure to include all the mysterious items Holmes finds and repeats throughout the story. What I noticed with the word cloud using worddle it was quite simple and with the different words bolder and in different colors it helped get a feel for the story and what pieces or people are important. I couldn’t really find any bad points with using worddle I thought it was rather easy and helped display information. What I did find difficult was voyant. With voyant I tried copying the text and I couldn’t work the site well enough so that it wouldn’t put in stopwords. Also with voyant I found it hard to personalize the information, but that could be because I’m not very tech savvy and couldn’t quite figure it out. In terms, of overall satisfaction with making a word cloud I very much enjoyed it. ashley ashley 2

Word Clouds: An Engineer’s Thumb

~ Annie Swafford ~ 1 Comment

I’ll be honest, I have not heard of word clouds until a few days ago when we discussed them in class.  I have seen them but, I thought they’re only a way of counting the amount of times a word appears in a text, but they’re more than that. They can reveal some overall themes of the text based on how frequently they occur.  My story for example, had the word “German” appear several times, although this was to denote that fact that the characters Lysander and Elise are German.  Also sometimes if the name of a place appears a few times, it could mean that it could play a minor role in the story.  Watson at the time has a practice near Paddington Station and it is noted that Paddington is used as a reference several times in the story.  Also engineer and hydraulics appear a few times as the victim, Victor Hatherley is a hydraulics engineer, showing some insight about a character’s life.

Now, there is some arguments against the use of word clouds, as explained by Jacob Harris of The New York Times.  I agree to a certain extent that word clouds are considered to be a crude analysis of a speech, story, or other text but maybe people should not consider word clouds to be very informative.  Now if they are well thought out and carefully crafted they can be somewhat useful as a learning aid, but you don’t really know how these words connect.

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So to create these word clouds I have used two of the tools, the first one I used is Wordle.  I found it very simple to use, except there is one major flaw. In order to get to one of the menus, I found myself having to click the word cloud itself before I can even open one of the menus.  That’s a big demerit in my book as this is irritating and I was wondering if my touchpad was thinking the same.  Once you get past that, Wordle is very straightforward and you can easily change the font, color and shape (though it’s very limited).  You can call this the iPhone of word cloud generators since it’s does exactly what you need, except there’s a fatal flaw that drives you insane.

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The second tool I used was Tagxedo, and I found its advanced options to be great.  The official site says “Making word cloud is fun, and is much more fun with Tagxedo!” They are absolutely right, I had a lot of fun making the word clouds with this tool!  The possibilities are endless! My word cloud is in the shape of a swan, which does make the cloud look nice.  Obviously nothing is perfect as Tagxedo has a few flaws, first off, when you move your cursor over a word the small ones are still hard to read.  Another flaw is that it didn’t work on Google Chrome (for me at least) and I had to use Safari.  The last flaw was the fact that I couldn’t figure out how to change the colors, it only changed when you changed the theme.  I do believe that there is a “pro” version that would allow the capabilities or maybe I just missed something.  Still, I really enjoyed using Tagxedo and I think it is a great tool for making word clouds.

Lauren Gao’s Word Cloud Project: The Adventure of Silver Blaze

~ Annie Swafford

Word clouds are an interesting way to get a broad insight on the trends of a text or the data that could arise from it. Usually applied to interviews, documents, or other mediums of text, the diagram showcases the most often reoccurring words from the largest (most frequent) to the smallest (least frequent). As for the question of how accurate the representation of the data truly is through word clouds or tag clouds, remains to be seen. To see this for myself, I put Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” through two word cloud programs, Voyant and Tagxedo. Before I layout what the general premise of the story is, it might be more interesting to see how good of a job word clouds do in “giving the whole picture” of the story.

Here’s the first from Voyant,

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Word Cloud: The Man with the Twisted Lip

~ Annie Swafford

For my word cloud project, I decided to use the Sherlock Holmes story The Man with the Twisted Lip.

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I used the program Voyant to create my first word cloud, which I ultimately wasn’t happy with. While it was easy to use, the program isn’t very customizable – as far as I could tell, I couldn’t change the font, color, or shape of the cloud. The color scheme isn’t aesthetically pleasing, and the generic Impact font leaves quite a bit to be desired (in my very humble opinion). There isn’t a uniqueness to any of the clouds produced by this tool, which definitely does not make it my favorite.

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For my second word cloud, I used Tagxedo, which I found far superior. The program features a number of varying color schemes and fonts and a large array of shapes to choose from (everything from a snowman to the United Kingdom). While a word cloud is still clearly an informative tool, it is one that draws interest for its aesthetic value.

The two processes yielded similar results; for example, three of the most prominent words were “Holmes,” “man,” and “St.” Many of the most popular words were predictable, as they carried the themes of the story. All three parts of Neville St. Clair’s name appear in the clouds, as he is the supposed victim in the mystery. “Window” is large in both, as the window of a bedroom factors largely into the story.

I find the fairly prominent “face” is most interesting: although the title of the story clearly indicates a part of the face (‘the Twisted Lip’), there isn’t much mention of it throughout the story. Of course, the face of a suspect in the crime proves to be a deciding factor in the case, but its importance is only revealed at the end of the short story.

Overall, I think word clouds (when created well) are an interesting, visually appealing means of presenting the themes of a body of text – and, to be honest, I would never have thought before to test one with a story.