Digital Humanities - Lab Session

 

This blog is based on Digital Humanities this task was assigned by Dilip Barad sir.

Poem written by a human or a computer :

Unlocking Literary Secrets: A Journey with CLiC and Voyant Tools

Beyond just enjoying the story, computational tools allow us to delve into the very fabric of language and uncover patterns that traditional close reading might miss. My recent activities using CLiC (Corpus Linguistics in Chicago/Context) and Voyant Tools have opened up a fascinating new dimension to studying 19th-century novels by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.

CLiC: The Corpus Linguistics Powerhouse

The CLiC Project (clic.bham.ac.uk), developed at the University of Birmingham, is a game-changer for literary analysis. It works with a massive corpus (collection of texts), predominantly 19th-century novels, and allows users to perform sophisticated linguistic searches.

Key Activity: Concordance of 'Regret' and 'Gratitude' in Great Expectations

Using CLiC's Concordance function, I searched for the terms 'remorseful guilt regret' and the thesaurus for 'gratitude' in Dickens's Great Expectations.

What is a Concordance? It's a list of every instance of a search word or phrase in the corpus, displayed with its immediate context (the words surrounding it, often called the Left and Right context).

The Finding: The concordance lines (as seen in the screenshots) revealed how frequently and in what specific contexts regret and related words appeared. For instance, the search for 'remorseful guilt regret' directly highlighted passages related to Pip's moral development and his internal struggles. Similarly, a search for synonyms of gratitude helped map out the characterization around that theme.

Learning Outcome: I learned to perform targeted searches to track the semantic fields of specific concepts within a novel. The concordance view provides quantifiable evidence for literary arguments, allowing me to see the patterns of a character's language or a novel's thematic focus. It transforms an intuitive reading into an evidenced-based analysis of word usage and characterisation.

Voyant Tools: Visualizing the Text

Voyant Tools offers a suite of web-based applications for text analysis, allowing you to visualize and interact with the data in unique ways. It provides a less rigid, more exploratory approach to corpus analysis.

Key Activity: Exploring Term Relationships and Frequency

I uploaded a text or set of instructional materials (the corpus for this activity) into Voyant Tools. The tools instantly provided a visualization of the data.

Word Cloud (Cirrus/TermsBerry): The size of the words in the cloud (e.g., concordance, corpus, page, examples, dickens, novels) indicates their frequency in the text, immediately highlighting the keywords and central concepts of the material.

Term Relationships (Mandala/DreamScape): The Mandala visualization showed how various terms (like 'activity', 'figure', 'search', 'novels') relate to the core concept 'CLiC_Activity'. The DreamScape visualization, though abstract, can show connections between terms across the text.

Scatterplot (Contexts/Collocates): The plot showing 'Percentage of Total Association Explained by Each Dimension' is a powerful visualization, showing how certain words cluster together (e.g., 'jane' and 'austen' are clearly grouped, and 'dickens' and 'activity' are near each other). This technique helps identify collocates—words that frequently appear near each other—which is key to understanding language use.

Learning Outcome: The Power of Visualization 

Voyant Tools taught me that linguistic analysis doesn't have to be purely statistical. Visualization makes complex data about word frequency and term association instantly accessible. It's a quick and powerful way to:

Identify major themes and subjects (corpus) at a glance.

Explore relationships between keywords (language).

Find patterns that link authors (like Dickens and Austen) or specific characters to certain linguistic features.

Overall Learning Reflection: Computational Literary Studies

My work with CLiC and Voyant Tools has fundamentally changed how I approach literary studies.

Empirical Evidence: Instead of relying solely on subjective interpretation, I can now ground my observations in empirical evidence drawn from the textual data.

Efficiency: These tools make it possible to process a vast amount of text (entire novels or corpora) in seconds, something impossible with traditional reading methods.

Interdisciplinary Skillset: I’ve gained a valuable interdisciplinary skillset, combining literature and computational linguistics. This blend is crucial in the emerging field of Digital Humanities.

This experience has proven that the intersection of technology and literature is a fertile ground for discovery. I highly recommend these activities to anyone looking to move beyond the page and see the inner language mechanics of their favorite novels.