#Sherlock #Holmes #DHM293
Sherlock Holmes: The Blue Carbuncle (1892) and (1984) – Sam Eisenbaum
WORDCLOUDS– click on “enable editing.”
Word choice is imperative to determine the historical changes in dialect between the 1892 version and the 1984 television screenplay of Sherlock Holmes: The Blue Carbuncle. I’ve developed a deeper understanding of the societal shifts in history using word clouds and the word tools used to construct them.
Similar to Wordle, Voyant and Tagxedo, iLanguageCloud generates a word cloud that enlarges the most frequently used words found in a submitted text. My computer does not allow me to use java programs and, for whatever reason, would not let me update it so my choice in word mapping tools was limited. What I realized is that Java is essential on mobile platforms to navigate through Wordle and Tagxedo leaving Voyant as the only word cloud software tool compatible for both mobile usage and computers without Java installed. This simple inaccessibility is a concern for both Wordle and Tagxedo. These sites need to take in account the amount of mobile users who use their phones primarily for electronic applications and software. Wordle and Tagxedo must develop mobile friendly software to accompany their desktop companions in order to keep up with the digital age. Though I was inable to constitute a Wordle or Tagxedo word map, utilizing my mobile phone, I downloaded the application iLanguageCloud—a high comparable software tool alternative for word cloud creation.
The words: remarked, pray, retained, yes, market and case are used in Arthur Carter Doyle’s original 1892 version of The Blue Carbuncle; the words: foresight, milady, yeah, museum, jewel, God, police, and money are used in John Hawkesworth’s 1984 version. Both sets of words are respectfully divided using the iLanguageCloud software application for the smartphone.
In the first word cloud, generated by iLanguageCloud, we note the shift from “yes” to “yeah” as a formal to informal verbal transition from 1892 to 1984. We can see that “pray” is used in Doyle’s version while “God” is used in Hawkesworth’s version signifying a religious connection between the two. The words “remarked” and “retained” are used only in the 1892 version since they are observational words used by Watson and, being that the 1984 version is told in 3rd person, are of ill usage towards progressing the story. Before moving on to deeper connections, I will introduce the Voyant word cloud I developed using the same two versions of Sherlock Holmes: The Blue Carbuncle.
From an aesthetic standpoint, the iLanguageCloud word map produces an immaculate display of words in a neatly organized in a visually appealing array of spacing. The colors are vivid and the words, though numerous, do not feel squished, scrunched or displeasing to the eyes. This word map features a black background which makes the colorful words pop out, allowing easy readability and engagement. The Voyant word cloud offers an agitating bundle of colors pressed uncomfortably together in front of a white background. Voyant does not have nearly as many words displayed as iLanguageCloud does and yet, the spacing, alignment and design of Voyant’s word cloud is visually atrocious. Voyant offers 5 different colors varied between the multi-sized words framed in its oblate spheroid structure. iLanguageCloud offers around 15 colors that are much more thoughtfully designed, spaced and configured for optical viewing. Though Voyant may be less asthetically pleasing and does offer less words, Voyant displays keywords that iLanguageCloud did not pick up—perhaps more important for some aspects of comparison.
Voyant picked up the words: gas, beer, pounds, money, books, sold and police in John Hawkesworth’s 1984 version. This set of words is not found in Arthur Carter Doyle’s original 1892 version of The Blue Carbuncle. This is because within a century, the world became much more materialistic as commodities naturally became a larger part of our vocabulary, dialect and conversations. It’s interesting to see the word “gas” used in the 1984 version because the first gasoline powered automobile was developed in 1893—one year after Doyle’s version was published. In 1984, “gas” had become a commonly used word after automobiles became a commonplace method of transportation. Using word clouds allows us to infer connections of societal changes between two historical time frames.
Aside from the addition of materialistic references in the 1984 story, both 1984 word clouds suggest an upgraded view of women from the overtly misogynistic view of women in the 1892 version. Although perhaps a small detail, all four word clouds utilize the words (abbreviations) “Mr.” and “Mrs.” However, the word “Mrs.” is significantly larger, and thus more frequently used, in Hawkesworth’s word cloud than Doyle’s. We can infer that as time went by, women became more thoughtfully incorporated characters in Holmes’ stories in opposition to the sexist vision of female characters in 1892, portrayed as inferior for Sherlock’s amusement. iLanguageCloud also highlights the term, “milady,” used to address a woman in a noble manner. This term is found only in the 1984 version because Doyle would not have his male characters address women in this fashion.
Comparing iLanguageCloud and Voyant word clouds, we can identify the historical shift in language usage and its impact on our perception of both versions of Sherlock Holmes. Word cloud users are able to evaluate the context of each version’s social matter to recognize shifts in materialistic terminology as well as the transition to lesser misogynistic viewpoints. While iLanguageCloud offers a more in depth, visually appealing display of word mapping, Voyant offers a similar exhibition of vocabulary that highlights many of the same historical observations used to compare and contrast the century divided time periods of Sherlock Holmes: The Blue Carbuncle.
Communication Through Time: Telegraph vs. Telephone
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.
I 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.
A new view of great Victorian writers
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.
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
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. 
Word Clouds: How to Decipher the Floating Text
My experience with word clouds has always been for fun. It might be a bit weird to analyze William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (here’s a link, it’s awesome), but what else would I do with my time?
I used Tagxedo and Voyant to make my clouds of The Red-Headed League by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Tagxedo was exceedingly simple to use, which was nice. Stop words were already included.Your creation becomes shareable on social media platforms, mugs, and t shirts. Nice feature there, as the word clouds are very pretty. You can create your own color schemes, choose what shape your cloud is, and so on. I liked that feature, but I can see how you could get carried away design wise. If you want a neon pink, mustard yellow, and brown colored Abraham Lincoln shaped visualization, it can happen. Please don’t.
Tagxedo didn’t have much function in analyzing the words. The data and stats are much more accessible via Voyant. The corpus reader section especially paired the word cloud with the text, and its search function was a strong addition to the site. Also, I liked how easy it was to edit the stop words.Voyant didn’t have as much design flair, but I thought the explicit word breakdown made up for it.
Working with Word Cloud: sometimes disappointing
It is enjoyable for me choosing the better design options, what I could exercise with Word Cloud. However, I felt disappointed about some limitations of the platforms. On Wordle and Voyant I couldn’t eliminate some words that I thought unnecessary to display. My intention was to tell The Speckled Band story, so that, I wanted to use just the words that were meaningful to the it.
Therefore, I tried to eliminate verbs that are meaningless. “Shall”, “may”, “might”, “see”, “come” are common verbs in any text, and kept showing up. “One”, “way” “little”, “hand”, “last”, now, “round”, “side” are also examples of words that kept showing up and don’t mean anything out of the story’s context.
For me, the platform Voyant is not user-friendly at all. The options are not clear and I didn’t manage to exclude any of the meaningless words. The icons are small, a lot of windows shows up at the same time, what makes it confusing to navigate. Besides that, I didn’t find options to change the color or the design of my Word Cloud. The only interesting resource that I have found was the graphic that shows the appearance of a word per segment of the text.
On Wordle the resource of eliminating word was not so good as on Tagxedo, which platform I considered the most user-friendly, and also the one that contains the bigger variety of resources. There I could click on each word that were frequent on the text, but I wanted to eliminate. On Wordle, it wasn’t possible, but at least I could limit the maximum number of words, what helped me to discard some meaningless words.
A Kiss Goodbye, A Kiss Hello
The book, The Life and Death in Rebel Prisons by Robert Kellogg, published in 1865, contains an imprisoned marking within the binding. Etched into the fabrics of the page are a pair of red lip stick markings. A kiss goodbye, or a kiss hello?
A kiss goodbye to the man on their way to Lee’s army or a kiss hello to the man who safely arrived to Newbern. A kiss goodbye to someone fallen at the hands of Lee in battle. A kiss hello, to the death and demise of the village of Newbern; a kiss goodbye to the village itself. A kiss hello to welcome the men of Charleston. A kiss hello to the anniversary of our nation, to the harbinger summer and the bright Southern sky. Did a woman fall in love with a man who arrived in Charleston? Did she lose him on the journey there. Did she lose him in the prison, Andersonville. Was the last time she saw the man she loved before he was captured–before he was killed? Did a man carry these lips within the binding of his hands as he wept alone in prison. Did he lose it on the way? Is it a kiss goodbye to those southern days, those summer celebrations, the last of what was left. Was it a kiss hello to the arrival of something fresh and new? The lip prints evoke many questions as to their origins. A kiss of death or a kiss of love? If anyone knows the woman who owns these lips, ask them why they pressed this print.
Check out the post on Book Traces! http://www.booktraces.org/book-submission-life-and-death-in-rebel-prisons/
Lauren Gao’s Marginalia Findings:The Philosophy of Carlyle
It is not often that a class entails students to perform detective work in the library. However, after the four years I have spent in undergraduate college, I am beginning to realize that much of undergrad level research, is actually disguised detective work. This time, our class had many of treasure trove-ing in the Sojourner Truth Library at New Paltz in 19th and early 20th century literature to capture and document the unique marginalia found in the supposedly “self-destructive” physical texts of this time period. My expedition in the deep level of the library brought be to this old but plain and unassuming book titled, The Philosophy of Carlyle, written by Edwin D. Mead and published in Boston by Houghton, Mifflin and Company of The Riverside Press, Cambridge, in 1881.
Now, before we delve into the fascinating bits of things that were handwritten by people a century ago, you might be asking the same question I did while I was gingerly inching this old and worm book out of the shelves, who is Carlyle?
A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith: 19th Century Book Study
While looking through the stacks of the Sojourner Truth Library, I found some marginalia traces as well as a few newspaper inserts in one of the first 5 books that I looked in (a very lucky find). The book is titled A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith. This book was written by Reverend Sydney Smith’s daughter, Lady Saba Holland, in 1855, 10 years after Sydney Smith’s death, and was published in London. Reverend Sydney Smith was a 19th century English clergyman and writer.
This book is the first of two volumes, with this volume having the title the Life & Letters of Sydney Smith.
The marginalia trace that I found is right before the title page of the book, on the inside cover page. So when I first opened the book, I immediately hit jackpot. It’s written in fountain pen, which was the biggest indication that this is a trace from the 19th century. This is probably the signature of the original owner of this book. From inspection, it looks like it says the name “Olive B. Sarry”. It bummed me out because I spent some time trying to research the name, but I couldn’t find any clues to help me figure out who this person was.
The other things that I found in this book were newspaper inserts that all pertained to Reverend Sydney Smith. They range from about 1945-1954. Though they’re not from the 19th century, I still thought that they were a really cool find. The first one that I found is pasted right on the title page. It’s an article called No Matter, talking about a man named Bishop Berkeley and his criticisms against Sydney Smith. I also found a couple newspaper inserts on page 448. One of them is from the Times Literary Supplement, a weekly literary review published in London.
Along with this, there were a few other little notes that I found written throughout the book. They seemed to be random numbers (or years?) written in pencil, so they might not be from the 19th century.
*Also, here’s my link to my submission to Book Traces!