Words II Assignment

For this assignment, you add all three fictional works (Shakespeare’s plays, Don Quijote, and Journey to the West to Voyant and then compare the works.

A. Review the readings from last week.

• Wu Cheng’en Reading: Journey to the West

• Introduction to William Shakespeare

Introduction to Miguel de Cervantes

Voyant tools Note If too many students use this web tool at the same time, it can crash.

B. Use the following links to input the required texts:

• The complete works of Shakespeare – http://norvig.com/ngrams/shakespeare.txt (Shakespeare died 1616)

• Journey to the West,* *http://chine.in/fichiers/jourwest.pdf, Classic Chinese Tale of the Stone Monkey king forced by Buddha to work with a Buddhist Monk, 1592.

• Don Quijote– http://cervantes.tamu.edu/english/ctxt/DQ_Ormsby/part1_DQ_Ormsby.html, Miguel de Cervatnes, died 1616

C. Look up articles in our Library databases based on your results from Voyant.

D. Write three paragraphs analyzing your results from Voyant and based on your reading from our Library databases.

2. Learning goals

By the end of this lesson a student will:

1. Be able to enter a corpus of texts into Voyant.

2. Edit stopwords

3. Lookup an article in our Library database.

4. Analyze Voyant results using background information from the Library database.

5. Write three paragraphs, one paragraph about each different corpus (group of) texts (Don Quijote, Journey to the West, Collective Works of Shakespeare).

3. Start by dropping the URL (web address) of one of the texts into the Voyant search box. This should be the actual fiction works, not the background information.

Then click “Reveal”

4. Read the wordcloud and edit stopwords.

Eliminate common words that don’t help you understand the past.

5. Edit stopwords

6. Add stopwords that don’t tell you anything about the past.

7. Confirm your new list of stopwords

8. Enter in some words to answer a question about poverty in history.

Below I wanted to know if Shakespeare cared more about shoes or wine based on how often he mentions them in all his plays. Looks like he mentions wine 79 times and shoe or shoes 20 times.

If I were to write a paragraph using these results, I’d make an argument about why wine was four times more prominent in Shakespeares plays than shoes and what that told me about poverty in 16th century England. For example, I could argue that wine was something people wanted to drink but often could not afford, and so it shows up as a signifier of wealth in plays. Shoes, which most people would need, was too common an object to warrant many mentions.

9. In order to make an argument about wine and shoes, I’d need to some background reading on 16th century England.

To do so, I’d go to Gale Virtual Reference Library or Daily Life in History and find an article on 16th century English everyday life.

Daily Life in History

Grading Criteria

Student:

1. Successfully entered a corpus of texts into Voyant.

2. Edited stopwords to make the Voyant analysis historically relevant.

3. Found and read an article in our Library database based on each the three corpus of texts.

4. Analyzed Voyant results using background information from the Library database.

5. Wrote three paragraphs, one paragraph about each different corpus (group of) texts (Don Quijote, Journey to the West, Collective Works of Shakespeare)._ and demonstrating a link between their Voyant analysis and poverty.