“Bull” is more popular in 40% of the parts of the fiction corpus. However, in the nonfiction “Bull” was more popular in nonfiction by a significant amount. There is also a significant difference between how much “bull” is mentioned in living and posthumous works – 1495 and 573 mentions, respectively. Even taking into account the differences between the wordcount of living vs. posthumous works, “bull” appears more often in the living works. The ratio ends up being around 2.6 “bulls” in living work to 1 “bulls” in posthumous work. 27.7% of the mentions of “bull” are in posthumous work while the remaining 72.3% are in the living works.And while “Fish” does not appear in Torrents of Spring, “Bull” appears in every part of the fiction corpus. Unsurprisingly, “Fish” dominates in The Old Man and the Sea.
Because Hemingway was big into hunting and fishing in his writing, we can assume that bulls and fish are two things that are constantly on the edge between life and death. We decided to look at the balance between life and death in Hemingway’s writing in another sense: the difference between his living and posthumous works.
By taking a first glance at top word trends between the posthumous nonfiction works (shown on the left) and living nonfiction (shown on the right) there are a couple of similarities and differences. Lots of these differences can probably be automatically discounted. For example words like “mary,” “antonio,” “lion,” and “m’cola” can’t really be presumed too much into because those are specific signifiers that probably only showed up for specific works. There are a lot of commonalities such the much popular “said,” “bull,”(surprisingly) “good,” and “time.” Then again, you probably can’t read too much into this because these are pretty common words, but it’s interesting that “bull” shows up as a super high trend in both groups.
Vocab Density and Words per Sentence (Posthumous nonfiction vs living nonfiction)
PHF: 0.046 and 10.5
PHNF: 0.055 and 16.3
LF: 0.028 and 10.5
LNF: 0.063 and 19.9
One may assume that nonfiction would have less vocabulary density because it is more realistic, but Hemingway’s works show the opposite. His fiction has less variety in words than the nonfiction, but this may also be linked to the words per sentence. In both living and posthumous fiction, the average words per sentence is 10.5. Do shorter sentences always signal less word variety?
The most common word between both living and posthumous works was “good,” 2473 and 1333 mentions, respectively (meaning that 35% of the mentions are in posthumous work, which correlates closely with the word count of the posthumous work). The only other adjective that appears in the top 20 words of living works is “old,” and there are no other adjectives in the top 20 words of posthumous work.
Living work is 888,326 words and posthumous work is 417,175 words. 31.9% of his works were published after his death.
The word density shows a large difference between his living and posthumous fiction, with his posthumous fiction having twice as high of vocabulary density. This could be the result of different editing procedures between editing the works of a living author and the works of a dead one. It may be that the posthumous editors might not have captured the between-the-lines feel that Hemingway is known for. Perhaps they added too much. This is obviously conjecture, but much of our takeaways from Voyant are.
Out of all of his writings, Hemingway has written a little over 1.3 million words. Put into average novel lengths, that is about 15-20 normal novels written to an adult audience. His top ten words used besides the stop words are good, like, know, man, came, went, come, time, right, and looked. His average words per sentence is a somewhat short 11.9. He used a total of 28,289 unique words.
We played around with the Botnik keyboard. (You may have seen the Harry Potter chapter written by it.) We loaded it with the “living fiction” text file. Why? Because the keyboard only took files 4MB or under. 
“A man can make a noise. He felt death was still quite illegal. I love you. You’ll go out of sight or another drink too. If she could remember what you did, his lies that she respected, that night. Today was thursday. It flopped. “No more money for Margot” said Nick. He could promise them both fishing began in Paris. ” Credit: botnik.org, our group
Link to living fiction keyboard:
So what did the keyboard teach us? I played around with it a little by myself and started to get the hang of it. It revealed some interesting trends. First off, most narration happens in the past tense. Most verbs are consequently in the past tense. It’s nearly impossible to write anything taking place in the present tense with this keyboard. Dialogue is difficult to write with it, as is any sort of coherent story.
Link to other story
In conclusion, it would be interesting to know what was going through Hemingway’s mind when he decided which works to publish and which ones not to publish while he was alive. What were his reasons for keeping some works unpublished? Did editors only publish those things because they wanted to make more money off of Hemingway material or did they actually think it was worth publishing? We cannot answer all of these questions, but we can assume some interesting things by comparing the two different corpora. 