Abstract
This chapter showcases the value of several data visualization programs for textual analysis and demonstrates their benefits in considering single, complex texts. The author applies Voyant, Palladio, and Tableau to Frances Brooke’s 1769 epistolary novel, The History of Emily Montague, and explores their potential for graphic production, their usefulness when examining the temporal aspects of the novel’s epistolary structure, and their pitfalls in both research design structure and text selection. Voyant has helped the author identify specific terms used throughout the text, Palladio has created maps that highlighted geographic information, and Tableau has ordered letters by date, rather than by appearance in the text. Thus, this chapter narrates the process by which such visualizations can lead to new interpretations of the source text that are significant in themselves and/or point to new directions of analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, ed. Mary Jane Edwards (Don Mills, ON: Carleton University Press, 1985). All the references are to this edition.
- 2.
Frances Burney, Evelina, or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. Stewart J. Cooke (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 2004); Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 3.
Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 88.
- 4.
Ibid., 118.
- 5.
Stephen Carl Arch, “Frances Brooke’s ‘Circle of Friends’: The Limits of Epistolarity in The History of Emily Montague,” Early American Literature 39, no. 3 (2004): 471, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25057366.
- 6.
Altman, Epistolarity, 127–28.
- 7.
Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, 131–35.
- 8.
Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, “Voyant Tools,” accessed August 1, 2018, https://voyant-tools.org.
- 9.
Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair, Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 11.
- 10.
Rockwell and Sinclair, Hermeneutica, 11.
- 11.
Voyant’s algorithm will search for derivations of the root term; the options indicated in brackets here limit the search to the terms “happy” and “happi-” without returning derivations of “happen.”
- 12.
A search for variations of “love*” would also have included derivations of “lovely,” which would have shifted the focus of the search away from specifically emotion-related terms. I therefore searched the word “love” only; an additional 12 instances of “loved” occur in the text.
- 13.
Rockwell and Sinclair, Hermeneutica, 33.
- 14.
Ibid., 33–34.
- 15.
Such words are termed “stop words,” i.e., words that the algorithm will not consider because they appear too frequently. Other examples are “of,” “to,” “the,” “and,” and variants of the verb “to be.”
- 16.
Even here, for the sake of convenience, I have transcribed the text as I read it, rather than as it appears on the page; the program would not make such a distinction.
- 17.
Rockwell and Sinclair, Hermeneutica, 34.
- 18.
I would like to note that, as this chapter went through the publication process, a very generous anonymous reviewer provided suggestions on how to overcome a problem like this one with a solution I had no idea was possible: save each letter as a separate text and then enter them all as a corpus, rather than enter the novel as a single text. I mention this not only because I wish to express my gratitude to this reviewer, but also to highlight how the learning process continues long after the original work seems over.
- 19.
Mapping the Republic of Letters, Stanford University, accessed August 2, 2019, http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/.
- 20.
“Palladio,” Stanford University, accessed March 14, 2019, https://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/. This program was designed at Stanford University for the Mapping the Republic of Letters project and it is offered as a free online resource. The project design team includes Dan Edelstein (Lead Investigator), Nicole Coleman (Project Director), Ethan Jewett (Lead Developer), Eliza Wells (Research Assistant/Documentation Author), Giorgio Caviglia, and Mark Braude.
- 21.
Matthew O. Ward, Georges Grinstein, and Daniel Keim, Interactive Data Visualization: Foundations, Techniques, and Applications (Natick, MA: AK Peters, 2015), 55–56.
- 22.
George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 23.
Ward, Grinstein, and Keim, Interactive Data Visualization, 31.
- 24.
Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1.
- 25.
Only Letter 73 is dated on 24 February; the others are written on 25 February. However, a closer look at the text reveals that Emily notes the time of her writing at “Eleven at night” on Letter 73 and Bell’s response is timed as “Eight o’clock, just up” in Letter 74, which indicates that there is a very brief pause in their exchange, occasioned by the need to sleep.
- 26.
This final section encompasses letters 175–228, that is, a total of 53 letters.
- 27.
Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, 133.
- 28.
Ibid., 139.
- 29.
Lucy writes of her mother’s hopes for Rivers’ future financial prospects (he has come to Canada because of his father’s profligacy), and Emily decides to sacrifice her possibility of happiness as his wife and leaves him to find a wife with an income, as she has none. So, Emily travels to England but Rivers follows her; this shifts the narrative’s geospatial frame from Canada to England.
- 30.
Each section of the text represents 1/10 of the whole; with 228 total letters in the text, one section would be comprised of approximately 23 letters. With this in mind, I broke the text into sections to identify which letters to highlight in Tableau according to the word frequency trend graphs generated by Voyant (section 1: 1–22; section 2: 23–46; section 3: 47–69; section 4: 70–92; section 5: 93–115; section 6: 116–138; section 7: 139–161; section 8: 162–184; section 9: 185–207; and section 10: 206–228).
- 31.
My overarching argument about the text concerns the way that a letter sent from England to Canada brings information that affects its reader emotionally; Temple’s letter, traveling westward across the Atlantic, could instigate a deep emotional response in this paradigm. Although the odds of Temple’s single letter being so immersed in a sense of “please” that it skews the data are extremely low, they should not be ignored.
- 32.
Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, 251–88.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, 137–69.
- 35.
Robin Howells argues that the novel is a complex interweaving of citation, interlocution, and inscription when read through dialogism and Brooke uses various discourses to model the fluid and open nature of the epistolary genre in general. For details, see “Dialogism in Canada’s First Novel: The History of Emily Montague,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 20 (1993): 437–50.
Bibliography
Altman, Janet Gurkin. 1982. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Arch, Stephen Carl. 2004. Frances Brooke’s ‘Circle of Friends’: The Limits of Epistolarity in The History of Emily Montague. Early American Literature 39 (3): 465–485. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25057366.
Brooke, Frances. 1985. The History of Emily Montague, ed. Mary Jane Edwards. Don Mills: Carleton University Press.
Burney, Frances. 1998. Evelina, or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. Stewart J. Cooke. New York: W.W. Norton.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gregg, Melissa, and Greg Seigworth. 2010. An Inventory of Shimmers. In The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth, 1–25. Durham: Duke University Press.
Howells, Robin. 1993. Dialogism in Canada’s First Novel: The History of Emily Montague. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 20 (3/4): 437–450.
Mapping the Republic of Letters. Stanford University. http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/. Accessed 2 Aug 2018.
“Palladio.” Stanford University. https://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/. Accessed 14 Mar 2018.
Richardson, Samuel. 2004. Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross. London: Penguin.
———. 2008. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rockwell, Geoffrey, and Stéfan Sinclair. 2016. Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sinclar, Stéfan, and Geoffrey Rockwell. 2018. Voyant Tools. https://voyant-tools.org. Accessed 1 Aug 2018.
Ward, Matthew O., Georges Grinstein, and Daniel Keim. 2015. Interactive Data Visualization: Foundations, Techniques, and Applications. Natick: AK Peters.
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Hoffman, C.A. (2021). Exploring Data Visualization: Time, Emotion, and Epistolarity in Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague. In: Baird, I. (eds) Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54913-8_7
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