1.3 Voyant Activity

 

The clustering of words such as, "wild, large," "great, lips," "thick, long, visage," in the visualization made me realize a sensuousness of Poe that I did not get when reading the story. Perhaps it says more of my personality than of Poe's work.

The spike in use of "rain" between segment 5 and 6 and the steady decline of the use of the word between 6 and 9 made me curious about the progression of weather in the tale. I found it interesting that "crowd" is used most between segments 4 and 7, between which the "stranger" emerges. I thought that perhaps that was a good indication of how the mans personality may have developed in parallel with the growing crowd.

Lack of the word stranger in the first half of the story is appropriate due to the narrators uncanny ability to stereotype every person he sees. Only the one man is a stranger to him. I would have liked to have seen a little more denouement with the use of the word, but I suppose considering that the stranger's role in the tale ends so abruptly it is appropriate that the word would as well.

Waywardness only appears once in the tale, but it is such an appropriate description of the stranger and could also be congruous with despair. The stranger is described by Poe as being so utterly unpredictable and the narrator questions the man's motives, guessing at the perverse nature of the man's activities through sight of the knife and the man's reaction to crowds. This description could also be seen as congruent to despair because the man's obviously desperate character.

I would not say that this exercise changed the way that I understood Poe's tale, but I would say that it provided me with a gas lamp to shine on certain aspects of the tale. Using the text-mining to observe the use of certain words should not be taken as a way to critically analyze a story because it is like dissecting a literary work in a way that the author did not intend, therefore the person doing the mining could see or omit anything they consciously or subconsciously wanted. I would venture to say that to use this tool for critical analysis is just as if not more heretic than paraphrasing.

Overall I did not enjoy this activity. Aside from not being able to use many of the features that Voyant supposedly provides and not being able to do the keyword analysis on the words I had wanted to look into, continuously got an error message that simply would not allow me to view "Keywords in Context" of several words. As a small project to facilitate discussion of theme using words that appear more frequently this is a decent activity, but as a writer I think that this is a tool that would be best left to use by young aspiring writers, like myself, to see where we have trouble showing versus telling or bringing to light our personal vernacular by presenting us with words we use too often.