So, I tried to play around with Voyant and I think the difficult part is figuring out what you might possibly want to look for. It’s fun to just plug something in and see what happens, but then, it begs the questions…what am I looking at? what does this all mean? why do these lines and patterns matter?

For my project, I looked Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and was just trying to see if there were any patterns. Since the text relates to young women and knights, I figured looking at young, lady, and knight might yield something interesting. There seems to be some sort of increase of those words around the same parts of the novel, with a large increase in the use of knight in the middle. I’m sure I could find other patterns, but given that I didn’t really have a hypothesis prior to starting my search, I didn’t know what I wanted to look for.

I did try to compare a number of different novels to each other, but it seemed to be easier to just look at one.