How to not read a Victorian Novel “The Woman in White”.
Pre-Writing Activities 1. Find the book “The Woman in White” online. Go to Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/) where you’ll find free ebooks of The Woman in White: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/583 2. Make a text file of it. For some of the activities below you may need a text file version of the novel so that you can manipulate the text with various digital tools. Prepare this by downloading a plain text (.txt) version of the novel to a computer. Open it and delete all the extra stuff (the technical header at the top, all the legal language at the end, etc) that is not the actual novel. Save it again, making sure it remains a plain text (.txt) file. 3. Use the tools below to “not read” the novel: i) Word clouds. There are lots of word cloud generators online (such as https://tagcrowd.com/ and https://www.wordclouds.com/). When you feed them text, they’ll return a graphic representation of the most common words: the more frequently a word appears in the text, the larger it appears relative to other words on the screen. Using whichever generator works for you, 1/ generate clouds for the whole text, then 2/ break the book into chapters or sections and try those, and then 3/ play with excluding certain words (like “the” or “this”). ii) Text analysis tools. Voyant (https://voyant-tools.org/) and Tapor (http://tapor.ca/home) make freely available a suite of simple text analysis tools, including word frequency, concordance, collocates, and more. Explore these. Take time to experiment and tweak settings. Use at least one of these tools in addition to the word cloud generators. 4. Reflect. What insights, if any, do these tools provide? What kinds of words appear in the clouds? Are there patterns or in/consistencies? How might you “read” groups of words? With the text analysis software, what keywords or patterns did you pursue and why? What have you learned (and not learned) about the novel that you had not previously considered? What do you think the values and limitations of “not reading” this way are? What logics are these tools based in? Where might they be useful in future research projects or in analyzing other kinds of texts? Write an essay in which you discuss what you learned about the novel and about this kind of distant reading as opposed to our usual close reading habits. The goal is to actively think about what kinds of knowledge “not reading” a text in this way can or cannot produce.