Project 2: How ‘not’ to read: The Last Man, By Mary Shelley
How ‘not’ to read: The Last Man, By Mary Shelley
Dawoud Kazimee
Project 2
After doing a bit of research in the past few weeks on ‘distant reading’ I became quite interested in the theory as it is makes a lot of sense in many ways. I find it intriquing to think that one can decipher an entire novel by simply looking at key phrases and terms used throughout the novel. As it seems, a lot can be determined from a novel by simply entering it into a word-cloud-like program which in turn can pick out the important trends and patterns of a given novel. When I entered my novel into the Wordle program, there were instantly many trends and patterns that I noticed which uncovered many of the ideas and I could notice many of the story ideas that were part of the novel.
The most interesting thought of ‘distant reading’ in my opinion is the fact that many computers are starting to associate ‘distant reading’ as part of uncover novels, and also being able to categorize them based on their genre. In this article on Gizmodo’s website, a team from Standford University fed a computer 30 novels identified by genre into two computer programs, which were then asked to recognize the genre of six additional works. Both programs succeeded simply from identifying key words and traits that were common amongst those novels that were fed into the computers. The article also states that ‘distant reading’ could also uncover certain details about characters and plots of books that wouldn’t otherwise be noticed as much by the reader.
I chose to decode the book The Last Man by Mary Shelley. I have never read this book, and I was very eager to see how well this whole ‘distant reading’ idea worked as far as understand what the book was about without actually reading it word for word. I chose to use Wordle.com first because it seemed a lot easier to enter the text from Gutenberg.org. I then began to examine the larger words after I removed the common English words such as the, and, was, because, then, there, you, I, etc. After that, I entered my novel into the word cloud program in Voyant.com and compared the two as I changed the settings and played around with the word cloud types. I also found that changing the color of the cloud helped my eyes to notice certain words in the word cloud.
As I examined the novel through our ‘distant reading’ technique, I began to realize that the word cloud programs that we used also did a word count of how many of a particular word that were used in the novel. I quickly began to realize the names of the main characters. In both word clouds that I used I noticed the names “Adrian” which had a word count of 285 and “Raymond” which had a word count of 334 and seemed to be the largest. I also noticed one another name that looked to me as something of importance, which read “Perdita” and “Idris.”
Along with the names of these characters, I found the terms “Mother,” “Sister,” “Friend,” “Beloved,” “Children,” and “Son.” The importance of these words to me shows the connection between family and friends that may have resulted in some sort of significance to the story. My guess is that one of the main characters that were named before are one of these terms associated with my frequent words used in my word cloud. It was hard to try and associate the names with a gender as most of them, with exception to “Raymond,” could have been unisex, or are hard to tell apart. Besides those main points, I do believe that the story has a lot to do between a family.
The next important trend I noticed was the use of ‘life’ words, which described the state of which some of the characters may have been in. These words seemed to have been pretty big in size, which exemplified their importance within the novel. The words that I was able to tie together were as follows: Life, Death, Live, Spirit, Soul, Dead, and Fear. These words to me translate as many of the moods and lessons that the novel may present. In my opinion these words symbolize how the novel may have a lot to do with the human soul, and the words “Death” and “Life” are not in the novel to necessarily represent a physical form, but a more spiritual form in many senses.
Lastly, I noticed many words in large letters that represented romance. The words: Love, Heart, Beauty, Happy, and Dear were mainly the majority of the words that I noticed which were trends that I noticed in the novel. Again, this probably goes back to the characters in which two or more of them could have been involved in a romantic sense. Besides my simply findings that I have pointed out so far, I noticed many other clues in which gave some of the ideas of the plot away. From the word cloud I was able to identify that the story had taken place in England, and mainly in London because these two places came up a number of times.
It turns out to me that the Word cloud was quite helpful in a sense that I could figure out the main ideas of the story. From what I have found, I uncovered that the story was prominently about a love story, which took place in London. The story also had a lot to do with a family, which could have consisted of a mother, and two sisters, which were the main characters and may have been both in love with the ‘Last Man’ who was named “Raymond.” Although I found this project to be quite interesting in the sense that it helped uncover many of the main points, I don’t believe word clouds are as effective as actually reading the book, but they are far more efficient. I can definitely see how computer could be programed to decipher novels much more quickly and efficiently than humans. I found this project to be very interesting, and I was pleased with my results.