For part three of the Digital Edition Final Project, we were tasked with picking two different texts to compare to the primary text we chose to annotate, in my case, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s, The Lady of Shalott (1833). Before picking my two alternate texts to compare to The Lady of Shalott, I wanted to learn more about Tennyson’s life and pick the texts based on what I learned. While reading a biography, I learned about the deaths of Tennyson’s father in 1831 and two years after, the sudden death of his best friend, Arthur Hallam at the age of 22 (Emma Laybourn).
After learning this information, I wanted to see if it had an impact on Tennyson’s poetry. I shifted my focus to Tennyson’s work, starting with his first volume of poetry titled, Poems by Two Brothers, released in 1827 before his two losses. Next, I looked at his second volume of poetry, In Memoriam, released in 1850 after the deaths. The goal in picking these two volumes of poetry was to examine Tennyson’s writing to see if his losses impacted his writing. Did his writing become darker in the volumes of poetry after the deaths? In addition to this, I wanted to see which of the two volumes was closest to my primary text, The Lady of Shalott. To find an answer to my questions, I received data from computer science students, which detailed stats from all three volumes including average word length, average line length, the Type-Token Ratio, as well as the most frequent words.
- Volume 1 Stats (Poems by Two Brothers)
- Total word count: 118131
- Average word length: 4.39
- The Average Line Length (in characters): 22.33
- The Type-Token Ratio: 0.1824
- Volume 2 Stats (In Memoriam)
- Total word count: 15372
- Average word length: 4.02
- The Average Line Length (in characters): 27.63
- The Type-Token Ratio: 1.2535
- (The Lady of Shalott Stats)
- Total word count: 4174
- Average word length: 4.31
- The Average Line Length (in characters): 27.79
- The Type-Token Ratio: 5.5811
From this information, I was able to make a couple interesting observations regarding which volume of poetry was closest to The Lady of Shalott. For instance, volume 1 was closer in average word length, while volume two was closer in average line length. In addition to this, the Type-Token Ratio, which takes the total number of unique words and divides them by the total number of words from the segment of text. The closer the calculated number is to one, the greater the variety of vocabulary. This information could tell me something about how many different things Tennyson is writing in his poetry or if his poetry is now primarily focused on one theme. From the data, I found that Volume 2 was closer to The Lady of Shalott in TTR suggesting that his newer writing was richer and filled with a variety of vocabulary compared to his first volume, which he released when he was just 17.
The other data I looked at had some interesting information about the most frequent words in each volume (words that appeared 7 or more times within each volume). When looking at these words, I wanted to focus on words that were “darker” or “sad.” I wanted to focus on this because it highlighted the connection of Tennyson’s deaths and his grieving to the tone of his writing. The data I received from volume 1 was much more vast. I decided that there was not an overwhelming majority of “dark” words. Most of them seemed to be descriptive, lively words that would be used to describe a setting (nature, bloom, clear, blossoms, sun, rays, sweeter, etc.) This suggested what kind of poetry Tennyson was writing in his early years.
The second volume which detailed the poetry after Tennyson’s losses had a much clearer discrepancy in terms of the type of frequent words (Grief, life, day, loved, sleep, dark, never, heart, etc.) From this selection of words, I could tell that what Tennyson was writing about was definitely influenced by the death of his father and close friend. It seemed that themes of death, grief, and loss were highlighted more compared to the poetry before the losses. Although my questions may not have fully been answered, I had a good understanding of the impact Tennyson’s losses had on the tone and style of his writing. In addition to this, data about sentence length, word length, and Type-Token Ratio gave me insight into how Tennyson’s writing evolved from his earliest to later works.