Text Analysis

Text Analysis

By Clara and Merissa

The five main terms we decided to focus on are “God,” “Master,” “Life,” “Home,” and “Slave.”

We chose the Bubblelines visualization first because it allowed us to easily see the prominence of different terms in each independent work, making it much easier to compare and contrast the use of our selected terms.

In this data visualization, we first noticed that our selected terms don’t appear often in the first four narratives. Looking at the texts themselves, we can see that these four are much shorter than some of the later works. IT would be interesting to do further research into why these first narratives were so much shorter.

In this visualization, we also saw that throughout the narratives, God and Master are rarely both prominent terms. In “1789-equiano2,” as the frequency of “Master” falls, the frequency of “God” increases substantially. To look further into this matter, we could explore the relationship between social and religious power structures.

The next visualization we used was the streamgraph. We immediately noticed that, whereas the Arthur narrative has appeared very sparse in the Bubblelines visualization, the streamgraph strongly emphasizes the narrative’s use of “Master.” This is due to the fact that, while the Bubblelines visualization shows the actual frequency of the word in the work, the streamgraph shows the relative frequency compared to the rest of the work. The Bubblelines takes emphasis off the Arthur narrative because it is so short, but the streamgraph shows how impactful the word “Master” is in the work as a whole. Therefore, we think the streamgraph is more helpful for comparing works of varying lengths.

We also looked at the Mandala visualization. This visualization showed us that there were no connections between the Hammond narrative and “slave” or “home,” the Royal narrative and “God,” and the Horton narrative and “slave.” The only two terms that are connected to every single narrative are “Life” and “Master.” Both Hammond and Horton are missing connections to the word “slave,” a word that seems like it would be somewhat universal throughout these texts. These two texts are connected by what they lack, so it would be interesting to look more into what these narratives have in common.

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