Practicum 3: Text Analysis 1
I chose my favorite play, "The Importance of Being Earnest" to analyze, because I find British humor very amusing and thought that a close examination of it could reveal some things about Wilde's writing style and British humor.
My first attempt was with AntConc, but it refused to download, so I used Voyant and Lexos instead. I liked the colorful style, ease of use, and variety of interpretations of data of Lexos the best. It was an interesting and visually appealing way to analyze word frequency, and it was fun moving my cursor and observing the trends in word usage throughout the text.
I uploaded the file in its entirety and used the BubbleViz tool, removing the list of stopwords from the text:
"The Importance of Being Earnest" is written in play form, which means that any dialogue spoken is first labeled with the character's name. I thought it would be interesting to see if the amount of dialogue was important to the character. As you can see, "Jack" is the most frequently used word, with 286 usages. This makes sense as he's the main character, around which the play is centered. "Gwendolen" has 175 lines of dialogue, and "Cecily" has 254 lines. While Gwendolen is arguably a more important character than Cecily, it's interesting to see that she has a little more than half the amount of dialogue that Cecily does. This can perhaps be attributed to her intelligence (she is written as an extremely vain, shallow, and vapid character). Cecily, on the other hand, is portrayed as self-important and intelligent, thus, she speaks a little less than twice as much as Gwendolen, possibly because of her desire to be heard throughout the play.
Next, I also tried removing "project," "gutenberg," and all of the names from the text using the Scrub tool. This is what the resulting graph looked like:
I noticed that the word "am" (always used in conjunction with "I") was used 110 times, which accurately reflects the nature of the characters in the play: all rather self-centered and concerned with their own status or public image. "Name" was also a relatively popular word, which makes sense given that the entire play is concerned with the importance of names. "Oh," "yes," and "dear" were three of the most frequently used words, which I found funny because they're words typically characteristic of British patterns of speech. "Don't" was also a prominent word, which I can only interpret as a command used by many of the characters, who instruct one another on how to behave and how to think.
