My corpus, a compilation of class notes from the Comparative Humanities core course “Myth, Reason, Faith,” was inspired by the creative process of essay topic generation. My goal is to visualize theme patterns across texts in order to make potential essay topics more easily noticeable. I organized notes into separate documents for each text. For the purpose of essay writing, the “trends” feature of Voyant is useful for tracking terms over time, as long as the user sorts the documents by age beforehand. I am interested in the “creation” trend because most of its occurrences take place in the earliest texts of the course – with the exception of the Aeneid which, modeling itself after Homeric texts, is the creation epic of Rome. Although the Epistles also mention of “creation,” the word is much more common in the pagan creation texts. There must be some reason why the monotheistic authors did not feel the need to write in depth about creation. Were some notions of creation passed down from paganism to monotheism? In general, using my corpus in Voyant seems more useful for studying than essay writing. The word cloud and the corpus summary would be especially hellpful when studying for the final oral exams.
The word cloud displays all of the course’s most common words, which could be a good preview of the questions that might be asked on the final. The “distinctive words” in the corpus summary offer a quick refresher for every text. Not every text is summarized in a useful way, The Iliad is reduced to “achilles (6), patroclus (5), briseis (3), tears (2), objects (2);” but for someone who is already familiar with the epic, it gives me enough insight to jog my memory.
The visualizations Jigsaw offers are more directly useful for the purpose of essay inspiration. If I wanted to write an essay about sacrifice, I could click on the concept in the list view and it would find all the texts in which “sacrifice” is mentioned. Jigsaw’s graph and circular graph views are most elegant for comparing two concepts.
For example, I considered the concepts “Nostos” (homecoming) and “nature.” Both concepts are mentioned in The Oresteia and Daniel, and the topics of “God,” “Greece,” and “power” also share common ground in the two texts. The ability to view such connections all at once makes it simpler to discern which essay topics are more viable than others. The process of coming up with humanities essay topics is the same with or without Voyant and Jigsaw, but the visualization platforms offer multidimensional viewpoints that expose every possible connection, not just the tired connections (i.e. the “simplified and immutable truths”) every student learns about from professors’ canonized lectures and chooses to write about based on familiarity. The process of creating this corpus and choosing the entities with which to analyze it also helped me think about “Myth, Reason, Faith” critically. Voyant and Jigsaw do not entirely remove the human element of creativity within the humanities because the humanist must still choose which concepts to analyze; but the platforms might function as an effective essay outline.
Leave a Reply