Quantifying & Visualizing Literature

    After this week I have learned a lot more about extracting quantitative data from literature and art. When I first thought about extracting quantitative data from art I was having a hard time thinking about what data you could take out of a piece of art. I was applying this onto my digital humanities project which involved looking more in depth at digitized art pieces. While I was struggling to see what data could be pulled from mine I began to think about other classmates' projects that involved extracting quantitative data from art such as the Vogue project. A lot of data was extracted from these covers of Vogue that involved collecting data on the amount of colors that were most commonly used throughout the years, and what facial features were the most common to see. While learning how to use Voyant Tools this week I was able to see how much quantitative data can be extracted from literature. Voyant Tools allows us to analyze the text. These visualizations show what words are used most frequently in a story and what word the author uses the most through various novels. These tools can show us common themes between an author's series of stories. We can apply these methods to traditional literary research to get more quantitative data. I believe that we should be applying these tools because they allow researchers to extract different forms of data from literature works. For example, the Poe story I have applied into Voyant Tools uses the word "clock" twelve times in this short story. Another pattern I have extracted by using Voyant Tools is that the word "blood" is the third most commonly used word in this short story.