Author: Reed Widdoes

Reed Widdoes is a first year student at Bucknell University. He is from Pittsburgh P.A. and spent his high school years at a small boarding school in south central P.A. called Mercerburg Academy. His intended majors are International Relations and Linguistics. He speaks English, as well as minimal Spanish and Italian, and even less French and German.

Presentation Reflection

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A Brief Overview of the Corse So Far

The digital humanities 100 class focuses on the concept of distant reading– looking for underlying themes in huge corpora of texts using digital analyzing tools. We were asked to find a topic that we could research, create a question for that research, and finally put together a corpus to actually do the research on.

 

My Research Question

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I chose to investigate two fiction writers from similar time periods and backgrounds (who were in fact close friends), and how their distinct spiritual and religious beliefs reflected in their works. These two authors were C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Both created fantastical worlds in which they created fantastical deities and the ways in which they portrayed them, I would argue, reflected their own beliefs.

Creating My Corpus

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Putting aside my poor pun-manship, in my presentation I went on to describe the resources I used to create my corpus. As noted in the slide above, Canadian copyright law only extends 50 years past the death of the author, while American extends 75. Both my authors happened to be outside of Canadian law, while in American, which means that I had to access Canadian databases to gather the works of my authors.

A List of My Works

My corpus included 5 works from each of my authors. They spanned from their most well known (and largest) works, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, to some of their non-fiction writing, and even some of their correspondences regarding their pennings.

Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, a series of letters to various recipients, and Unfinished Tales: The Lost Lore of Middle Earth

The series of letters included letters to his publisher, his family, and to Lewis himself, all pertaining to The Lord of the Rings. The final work listed is a book much like The Silmarillion that details histories of Tolkien’s world not previously included.

 

Lewis: The Space Trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, Letters to Malcolm, and a series of unpublished letters

The Space Trilogy is a series of novels based on a joint project that was supposed to be in conjunction with Tolkien. Lewis finished his trilogy on space travel, but the accompanying trilogy on time travel, which was supposed to be written by Tolkien, was never finished (and barely started for that matter). The Screwtape Letters and Letters to Malcolm are a series about Lewis’s work as a Christian Apologist. Finally his unpublished letters were similarly about his others works, and written to various publishers and Tolkien.

 

My Work with Voyant 

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At this point my presentation shifted towards the research I had completed. I began with Voyant. Voyant is a great tool for creating pretty pictures and finding word frequency at certain places in a work, but as I explained, it is just not powerful enough to produce any kind of significant data, especially given the size of my corpus.

 

AntConc and My Findings 

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Antconc was the tool that provided the most useful data for my work. The word collocation tool allowed me to discover that while Tolkien empowers his villains in order to create a heroic storyline, Lewis also creates this effect but by enfeebling his heroes. The keyness tool allowed my to see that Tolkien’s works actually discussed the concept of faith and its manifestations much more often that Lewis’s (other than his apology work).

The Stubborn Jigsaw

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As I confessed in my presentation, Jigsaw is simply not very well suited for my corpus. Frankly, even the LOTR text which was broken down into smaller chunks, proved troublesome for this tool. In the end, I admitted defeat.

Moving Forward 

In concluding my presentation, I explained that I still had more cleaning to do before my corpus was complete, but even with just The Chronicles and LOTR, I was finding interesting results.

As Professor Faull has repeatedly said, corpus construction can be the most difficult part of textual analysis. After a few weeks into my research, I have found that she could not be more correct. First there is the task of collecting works for the corpus, which can involve internet searches leading to parts of the internet unbeknownst to me. Canadian archives where copyright laws have made most of what I was looking for available, became my saving grace, and offered me a great set of texts, that lend themselves perfectly to my research question.

The problem from that point was the cleaning. The only unfortunate part about the Canadian texts, were that they came in the form of PDF, a file incompatible with most textual analysis engines. For this reason, I have had to begin the most laborious part of my project, the cleaning and parsing of thousands of pages of literature. This involves moving all the text over to text editor, and then proceeding to go through and delete all the commentary that was not from either Tolkien or Lewis. This has proved rather bothersome, as some of the version of the texts I found seemed to have editors that were quite loquacious in their added script. All this must go, along with dates and other things, and be transferred into a meta data sheet. For examples sake, the following pictures are samples of the Chronicles of Narnia, before and after cleaning.

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To the left, the text looks like one might find in the actual novel, but to the right, the pure texts has been edited into a form ready to be read by engines such as Voyant and AntConc.

This provides a smooth transition into the far more interesting part of our research; the actual research.

The nature of my research question in inherently differential, as I am comparing two distinct authors.

My general is question: How do Tolkien and Lewis differ in the ways their writing reflects their spirituality? Does this mean that they have different views on religion or do they simply express it in different ways?

 

Accordingly I preformed searches in Voyant and AntConc in the main works from both authors. We began with Voyant and therefor it was the first engine I used. I wanted to look and see the usage of main characters and certain adjectives in both texts over time. These were my resultsScreen Shot 2016-02-24 at 12.15.01 PMScreen Shot 2016-02-24 at 12.24.14 PMScreen Shot 2016-02-24 at 12.18.52 PMScreen Shot 2016-02-24 at 12.27.32 PM

On the left, we have the Lord of the Rings and on the right, The Chronicles of Narnia. I performed frequency searches for the main characters on top, and then on the bottom, I search for the most common collocates of the words “dark” and “evil”. This was using Voyant.

 

Next, we moved onto AntConc. I used the Concordance tool to look at similar searches, looking for the hero and villain terms from each work.

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Again, on the left, was the LOTR search and The Chronicles on the right. Using the concordance tool, I found was able to see a complete list of the words surrounding the key terms for my research. This was a powerful tool for me.

 

Comparing the two platforms

Frankly for my research, AntConc has proven to be invaluable and far superior to Voyant. The ability to find concordances, as well as a more detailed collocates list trumps the less detailed information that Voyant gives. The most valuable tool AntConc offers, for me, is the Keyness search. Using this I have been able to compare the frequency of key religious terms in regards to the respective texts. This has been vital.

Using these tools I have discovered some interesting pragmatics of the Tolkien and Lewis texts. For example by searching for concordances of the respective “higher powers” in each text, I have found that Lewis tends to humble his savior character, while Tolkien empowers his villains, both creating the same effect.

Lewis describes Aslan, the lion, and a clear metaphor for a holy figure, as “humble” and “tame”, in a similar way that the bible describes Jesus. Conversely, Tolkien describes Sauron, the main villain and demigod of LOTR, as “powerful” and “fearsome”. While both craft their religious heroism in different ways, they provide the same effect. The less powerful hero (The lion or The Hobbits) defeat the seemingly omnipotent villain (The witch or Sauron).

 

The next step in the process will include looking into the authors other works, as well as reflecting further upon these findings to discover more upon the religious reflections of the works.

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Creating a Corpus for Dummies

Upon commencing my journey to create a corpus serviceable for the purpose of literary, yet empirical, investigation, I decided to look into a topic that seemed to be just mysterious to the writers as it seemed to the readers. By doing this I hoped to be able to discover facts or ideas about the text that certain authors had not thought to even include, ones possibly mired in their subconscious. To this end I immediately thought of J.R.R Tolkien, who admitted to having complex mythology and history created, feasibly that is what one does in the trenches of France during WWI, before even pen to paper. He wrote about a fictional world with fictional characters, so rich and deep that those who find it’s pages, often find themselves engrossed in its totality. How then, a scholar might ask, could this world relate or be derived from his experiences? The metaphors are rampart throughout the novel, Tolkien even stating; ““My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war”. What then is the relationship between the God of Middle Earth, Eru Illuvatar, and Tolkien’s Catholicism?

In order to offer a point of reference, I decided to look into the religious metaphors of a contemporary, compatriot, and friend to Tolkien, C.S. Lewis. Lewis was far more blunt regarding his faith, and as a generally known Apologist, the only people unable to understand the references to Christianity in his books The Chronicles of Narnia, were their intended readers, children. How though does Lewis display this character, Aslan, and how is his representation of a God different from Tolkien’s?

The next step was to find a set of texts I thought encompassed their respective writings on a whole. Upon online investigation I found some PDF’s of certain texts from both authors, being that they seemed to be out of copyright in Canada. I also received help for a large chunk of text from a former student of professor Faull’s. Upon completion and satisfaction with what I had gathered, I found myself with 5 bodies from each author. They are as follows:

Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, a series of letters to various recipients, and Unfinished Tales: The Lost Lore of Middle Earth.

Lewis: The Space Trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, Letters to Malcolm, and a series of unpublished letters.

In selecting these texts, I hoped to embody the works of each author not only in their famous fiction, but also in their less well known texts.

The difficult section of my task is the cleaning of corpus, as I am dealing with a huge amount of writing. Luckily enough for me, the copy of LOTR I received has already been cleaned and is ready to use, but that is merely the tip of the iceberg. The Chronicles of Narnia is of similar length and will need to be parsed in order to be readied for analysis. There is much work to be done in this department.

Finally, my I will discuss my search parameters for the actual analysis. Firstly, I will simply search for religious terms and adjectives used to describe said terms. Next I will repeat, but instead searching for the fictional characters that represent higher powers within the novels. I hope that this will provide some good insight into each authors representations of their beliefs.