So, while the word “Odysseus” can be used in English no matter where in the sentence it goes, Greek has to use different forms, such as ὀδυσσεύς (subject form) and ὀδυσσῆος (possessive form). A good comparison in English is how “he”, “him”, and “his” are all used in different ways - you wouldn’t say “Him went to the store”. Whether or not we can read the Greek words, we can see immediately that no single word is nearly as large as Odysseus was in the English cloud. What’s the reason for this? Unlike English, Ancient Greek is a language where the endings of nouns change based on how they are used in a sentence. Since the Odyssey was originally written in Ancient Greek, we can examine the word cloud created from the original text. Voyant does offer support for a wide variety of languages, not just English. These problems become more prominent when we try to use Voyant for texts in other languages. “Man” and “men” appear separately despite representing the same idea if they were combined, they would be nearly as large in the word cloud as Odysseus himself. Still, if we look closely, we can see some issues with the word cloud. We can see from the below Voyant graph that Odysseus is prominent throughout the entire text, but his son Telemachus is mostly absent from books 5 through 14. Voyant supplements the word clouds it generates with the frequency of common phrases and the distribution of words throughout a body of text. This information is no replacement for close reading, especially since there is no context, but it can add to an analysis. Word clouds, then, are useful for “previewing” a text for important characters, themes, and phrases. Other common words are parts of phrases repeated throughout the work – “spoke” and “words” are common because the narrator often introduces dialogue by using a phrase such as “he spoke with winged words”. We can also see some of the major themes of the work, such as “house” and “home”, which Odysseus wants to return to from his long voyage, and which Telemachus wants to protect from Penelope’s suitors (another significant word in the visualization). Voyant helps us to see that the name “Odysseus” occurs with the highest frequency by far of all the characters. The main characters are particularly prominent – Odysseus, his son Telemachus, his wife Penelope, and the gods Zeus and Athene (Athena). If you are familiar with the Odyssey, many of the high frequency words, which show in larger text in this word cloud, will not come as a surprise. You can also change which words Voyant removes, if you want. Voyant automatically removes words like “a”, “the”, and “is”, leaving only more meaningful terms. Kline’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey showing the 195 most frequent words. Voyant can be used to create visualizations such as a “word cloud”, where words that occur more frequently in a body of text will appear larger in the word cloud.īelow is a word cloud generated for A. Given one or more electronic texts, a tool like Voyant can help to answer these questions, supplementing the insight gained from close reading.
Text visualization tools can be helpful in this instance. In fact, when considering a very large text or group of texts, these questions can be difficult and time-consuming to answer. What are the key terms used? How much more space is devoted to one topic than to another? These questions aren’t answered by close reading alone. The understanding gained is precise and, when done well, shows important information about the text as a whole.Ĭlose reading, however, can and should be supplemented by an understanding of the overall themes of the text.
If you have done work in the Humanities, you have likely come across the concept of “close reading” - the careful, detailed examination and interpretation of a short passage of text. By Benjamin Niedzielski on December 12, 2018
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