I have never read The Count of Monte Cristo. I'm almost ashamed to claim to be an English major and not have read a classic novel such as this one. But, in all reality, who has time to read them all?
Looking at the word cloud I created on Wordle, there isn't much that surprises me. All the big words are there. Villefort, Danglars, Vallentine, Morrel, Monte, and Cristo are all names of the major characters. But if you look more closely at the other words in the word cloud, you find things such as house, man, eyes, alone, etc. Using Wordle, the data is pretty simple and doesn't reveal much.
Voyant, on the other hand, tells a different story entirely. The most frequent usage is that of the word said. It is used 3,476 times. Now obviously this isn't very intriguing. It merely shows that there is a lot of dialogue in the novel. Next in line is count. Again, this isn't surprising because it is a word in the title and the title of a main character. The next word most frequently used is man. Here's where the interest level picks up, but only a tiny bit. Man is used 1,301 times. Woman is only used 156 times. I'm not exactly sure what, if anything that can tell me about the novel in general but I thought it was an interesting fact to point out. According to Google ngram, the use of the word woman between 1800 and 2000 peaked around 1900 and then again around 2000. On a side note, usage of the word woman dipped around the 1960s. That's odd considering the rise of feminism. This novel was completed in 1844. Dumas was obviously right in line with the current trend of the usage of woman.
The next findings are also pretty usual considering the plot. The use of escape (98 times), secret (107 times), disappeared (109 times), stranger (78 times), cried (339 times), death (270 times), and prisoner (88 times) are descriptions for what happens within the plot. The focus of the plot is that of Edmond Dantes being arrested, imprisoned, and then escaping from jail. All of these words are easily placed in this text. At this point in the project, I was struggling to find anything truly intriguing about what the software found. However, as I continued to look through the list of the frequency of words and the graph that goes along with it, I began finding some things to talk about.
For instance, I noticed the color white was used 109 times and black was used 117 times but not many other colors were in the most frequent column. Later on I found blue with a total of 67 times. Again, I'm not sure what this really tells me but the colors each appear on the graph in a rollercoaster fashion.
Paragraph was used 11 times. Paper, on the other hand, was used 119 times and variences of paper include: newspaper, litmus-paper, and music-paper. The use of litmus-paper is intriguing when I found out that litmus paper was discovered in 1300 AD. Who knew? In this text, litmus-paper is used twice in the discussion of the poisoning of Barrois.
Several body parts were mentioned in the text. Body itself is mentioned 82 times. Teeth, oddly enough, is used 40 times. I have no explanation for this word but somehow it fits into the text many times. Tongue was used 24 times. The most odd occurance has to be forehead. It is used 59 times. Why is Dumas highlighting this part of the body? Hand was used 504 times. I can't even begin to surmise what this symbolizes without having read the novel. Although this software is rather fascinating, I'm not sure exactly what it can tell you about a novel other than the obvious data.
Most intresting was the pattern I found among certain words and their related words. Some related words were mentioned in the text the same number of times. For instance, laugh and laughing both appeared 43 times. Confound and confounded occured 4 times a piece. Blush and blushed, 7 times. Traced and traces happened 18 times. Protestations and protested were used 3 times and whitened and whitewash were used twice each. I don't know that we can say this was purposefully but it is a very odd occurance that I kept finding. Also interesting was the relationship between two words and how many times they occured. Moon and nights both appeared 15 times. While these aren't variatons of each other they are obviously related and occur the same amount in the text. Food and hunger are another instance of this coincidence. They each appear 25 times. This is where the word trends graph comes into play. According to the graph, food appears the most at the beginning of the book and hunger appears more at the end. Apparently where there is more mention of food, we can assume people were not hungry. And vice-versa. Without reading the novel, this is only an assumption. As for moon and nights, they seem to occur simultaneously.
Since we are discussing the telegraph in class currently, I thought it was interesting to note that telegraph was used 27 times. Also a really odd occurance was that of lemonade 19 times. Lemonade? Really? I couldn't find out when lemonade first started being ingested but it was obviously before 1844.
Now, all of this information doesn't really strike me as super uncommon other then the relation between words and their relatives and the number of times they occur. However, there are several words that stand out to me. Confetti appears 7 times in the text. Hmmmm. Heliotropes occurs 3 times. I looked at the keywords in context portion of Voyant to try and figure out what the word meant. It was used to discuss flowers and mostly in conjunction with roses. Boon was another instance when I had to use the keywords in context to decide what this word might represent. All I learned is that the word is used to describe boon conciousness and vision. I am not really sure about that word. But it is a cool word. The word genii is used 3 times. According to the graph, it only occurs in section 2 and section 6. The OED defines genii as: "a tutelary spirit." In other words, a genie. Knowing that it refers to ghosts or spirits, my last note about ghosts is interesting. Ghosts and giants, both odd beings, occur 3 times each. Human is mentioned 64 times.
Overall, this assignment was interesting. It was fun to play around with the word trends graph and the keywords in context portion of Voyant. The word cloud was similar to the one I created with Wordle. Once, I started looking at all the frequencies, it was hard not to browse through them all. There were 358 pages of frequently used words. After about page 11, the numbers drastically dropped. Pages 156-204 were consumed by words that were used only twice. The last pages were examples of words used only once. Neither of these really piqued my interest. However, the word jottings did jump out at me and was used only once. The concept of this project is awesome! I really enjoyed spending time with it. Hopefully my findings aren't as boring as they seem.