Results

See all the blog posts about our distant reading of Duffy.

Rationale

In our class, we’re tackling a very real research question that Carol Ann Duffy has unintentionally provided us: how different is The World’s Wife from the four volumes that preceded it?

You’ve already been asked to take the typical approach to analyzing Duffy’s poetry with a paper that asks you to close read select poems. In “Abstract Models for Literary History—1,” Franco Moretti asked what we might learn about literary history if we stop close reading and instead consider “the large mass of facts.” For our next class project, then, we will be seeing what we can learn by reading the large mass (relatively speaking) of facts in the total language of Standing Female Nude and The World’s Wife.

We will see, in other words, what a digital humanities approach might add to our already rich discussions of her poetry and your own, individual analyses of the differences between the two volumes—differences which, again, Duffy herself brought to our attention.

To do this we will draw on Voyant, a set of tools for text analysis developed by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, to see what we can learn about Duffy’s volumes and her language taken as a whole.

Of course, it’s important to recognize that we might not learn anything earth shattering—or even anything—by taking this approach. That’s okay. We are, to a certain extent, just screwing around. We’re operating here under the principle of experimentation that has guided our class. As Rockwell puts it in his essay “What is Text Analysis, Really?“: “Playful experimentation is a pragmatic approach of trying something, seeing if you obtain interesting results” (214, emphasis added). We’re out to have fun and see if we find anything interesting along the way.

The Nitty Gritty

Transcribe Duffy

To start playing, we need a few things. The first of these is a digital copy of the volumes of poetry. We’ll be creating these ourselves. You’re lucky: since my Fall 2011 class already transcribed The World’s Wife, you only need to tackle Standing Female Nude. Prior to 5pm on Monday, October 30, you must do the following:

• Check the Duffy poems spreadsheet for your assignment. I did my best to make the workload equitable.
• Add the full text of all the poems you’ve been assigned to this document. Make sure you put the poems in a) the proper volume and b) the order in which they appear. Please set the title of the poem to “Heading 3.”
  
• IMPORTANT! Before typing up your poems, you should do a Google search for it. Many of these poems are already posted around the Internet, especially on personal, poem-of-the-day blogs. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with copying and pasting from these sources! However, please look over the text to make sure there are no errors, including punctuation.
• For each of your poems, get a word and character count (both a count WITH and WITHOUT spaces). Do not include the title in this count. You can do this by selecting the text of the poem and then choosing “Word count” under the “Tools” menu.

Add the word count and character count as a comment to the title of the poem.

You can make comments from the “Insert” menu.

Voyant

With our last assignment, we used Google Earth to help find patterns in the movements of characters about London. We then did some interpretation of their different routes, helping us to understand aspects of the novel that were different than what we picked up while reading. Pattern recognition, followed by interpretation.

For Duffy’s poetry, each of your groups will experiment with at least two different tools in Voyant, looking to find patterns and then to interpret them. One of these tools will be specified after the group number. For the second tool, you should play with a range of options, and find which you think will best help you (again) find patterns and interpret them. You’ll want to look at them using both the entire corpus of Duffy’s poetry as a single document and with each book as a different document, as that will affect how the results appear.

Your group should collectively write a 700-word (minimum) blog post about the tools that you used, the patterns you found, and the interpretations you derived from them by the end of class on Thursday, 2 November. Post your work on one of your group member’s class blog.

Remember, we’re out to ask questions about whether The World’s Wife is different from Standing Female Nude (and Duffy’s other volumes that were published prior to 1999). Voyant will give you the ability to look at language as discrete chunks.

Group 1 (Word Trends)

Paul
Mike
Kelly
Liz
Chris
Amanda

Group 2 (Microsearch)

Stephen
Tara
Sadie
Miles
Elizabeth

Group 3 (Textual Arc)

Dane
Maddie
Shelbi
Alex
Clarissa

Grading

As an experimental class project, you are not being graded on what you and your group find about Duffy’s poetry. After all, we simply don’t know what we’ll find, if anything. Instead, you’ll be graded on (1) whether you accomplish all the parts of the assignment (pass / fail), (2) how engaged you are with the work and your group, and (3) how well you apply the method of pattern recognition / interpretation we’ve been embracing throughout the semester.