Distant Reading: "Through the Looking-Glass"
For this distant reading project, I chose Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, which was published in 1871. The only prior knowledge that I had of this book is that it can be considered a sequel to Alice in Wonderland and that it is linked to children with disabilities. My prior knowledge of the text allowed me to understand some of the word choices found in the novel.
Since I knew that the novel was about Alice from Alice in Wonderland, I was not surprised when Voyant calculated that “Alice” is used 434 times in the texts. Some other words like “tweedledee” and “tweedledum” did not surprise me, either. If this had been a text that I knew was not about Alice, I would definitely question those words’ place in the text.
The title of the novel is Through the Looking-Glass. I decided to see how many times that “looking-glass” is used in the text. The term is used 20 times throughout the text. Some similar words were used less often than “looking-glass.” “Glass” was used 7 times and “glasses” was used 3 times. I wanted to draw a conclusion about what the “looking-glass” referred to. Because of the title stating Through the Looking-Glass, I thought that the term might be used for a window. I used the word frequency search in Voyant to find that “window” was used on 6 times and “window-panes” was used once. The frequencies of those words are not high compared to other words used in the text. However, I allowed a “window” to suffice as a synonym for “looking-glass.”
I wanted to make sure that I tried every synonym that I could think of for “looking-glass,” so I searched for the word “mirror,” or its plural form. Not one time did Voyant show that “mirror” is in the text. I thought that this would support my theory that “looking-glass” is synonymous for “window,” without reading the text. Just looking at the text by the word frequencies, I believe that is a logical conclusion. However, I was wrong. When I used the “Keywords in Context” search tool on Voyant, it showed “looking-glass” being used in the following statement:” …held it up to the looking-glass, that it might see how…” The corpus reader took me to the spot in the text where this passage is at. I read the entire statement that says, “She held it [the kitten] up to the looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was.” Contrary to my inference, this statement used “looking-glass” to refer to a mirror. Some of the uses of the word in context after that one did not give any inference to whether it is a mirror or window. I was not able to decipher until I found “looking-glass” used in to describe a book that Alice lifted to another looking-glass so that the words would not be backwards. This, again, proved to me that “looking-glass” is a mirror.
I think that using these distant reading programs is a neat concept. I enjoyed finding out how many times a word is used in a text. However, I was not able to find out about the words until I used them in the “Keywords in Context” tab on Voyant, which is very similar to just reading the text. I still would like to read the novel, one day. If I am to use this program again, I am more inclined to use it with a text that I have already read.