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.
the mystery of the speckled band
“The Mystery of the Speckled Band”, reduced to its bare bones
Generated by Wordle, here’s a word cloud of The Mystery of the Speckled Band.
Perhaps most interesting is the prominence of Holmes and similar nouns- though I do believe there’s more to be said for Sir Doyle’s writing than there is for character in that regard. Particularly in the sense that “Holmes” occurs much more than “Watson”. Incidentally, the titular speckled band has one of the fewest mentions in the story itself. Again, perhaps there’s more about Doyle’s writing style, but I find the fact that the cloud is more centered around characters than the actual plot elements and mystery to be fairly intriguing.