{"id":586,"date":"2021-12-12T13:57:35","date_gmt":"2021-12-12T18:57:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalmethodsforthehumanities\/?page_id=586"},"modified":"2021-12-15T16:33:44","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T21:33:44","slug":"analysis-of-part-iii-distant-reading","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalmethodsforthehumanities\/digital-editions\/the-murders-in-the-rue-morgue-edgar-allan-poe\/analysis-of-part-iii-distant-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Analysis of Part III – Distant Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the distant reading part of this project, I asked my computer science group to\u00a0 create a stylistic fingerprint of \u201cBerenice,” one of Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s horror stories, and of \u201cThe Purloined Letter,” one of his detective stories, to see which was more similar to \u201cThe Murders in the Rue Morgue.” At first glance, the answer to this question seems obvious. \u201cThe Murders in the Rue Morgue\u201d and \u201cThe Purloined Letter\u201d are both detective stories with the same main characters and related plots, and so are likely to be more alike in terms of length, language and sentence structure than are \u201cBerenice\u201d and \u201cThe Murders in the Morgue.” But \u201cThe Murders in the Rue Morgue\u201d incorporates many elements of Poe\u2019s horror fiction (which includes \u201cBerenice\u201d) while \u201cThe Purloined Letter\u201d does not, so I wanted to create a stylistic fingerprint of all three to see whether any of the similarities in mood and tone between \u201cThe Murders in the Rue Morgue\u201d and \u201cBerenice\u201d would be reflected in the results of a more quantitative analysis of the texts.<\/span><\/p>\n

I presented this question to the computer science group and they wrote a program to analyze the stylistic features of each work from the standpoint of average word length, type-token ratio, hapax legomena ratio, average sentence length, and average sentence complexity. I did ask whether they could analyze any other features of the texts that might reflect mood or tone but they told me they could not because that would be beyond their programming capabilities.\u00a0 They explained that the type-token ratio \u200bis the ratio of the number of different words in a text to the total number of words in that text. In other words, it measures vocabulary variation within a text. The more distinct words a text uses, the higher its type-token ratio will be. The hapax legomena ratio \u200b\u200bis the ratio of words that occur exactly once in the text to the total number of words in that text so it measures the number of words used only once in a text. The computer science group defined average sentence complexity as the average number of punctuations in each sentence. \u00a0 Average sentence length and average word length are self-explanatory.\u00a0 To determine which text was more similar to \u201cThe Murders in the Rue Morgue\u201d, they calculated the results from each text for the five stylistic features mentioned above and then calculated the percentage error between \u201cBerenice\u201d and \u201cThe Murders in the Rue Morgue\u201d, and then between \u201cThe Purloined Letter\u201d and \u201cThe Murders in the Rue Morgue\u201d, and they concluded that, because \u201cThe Purloined Letter\u201d had a lower percentage error, it was more similar to \u201cThe Murders in the Rue Morgue.”<\/span><\/p>\n

It is not surprising that the two detective mysteries were more alike than \u201cThey Murders in the Rue Morgue\u201d and the horror story, but I wanted a little more information from them so that I could see the results for each of the stylistic features, and the magnitude of the difference between them in case the individual results told a different story.\u00a0 The information they provided is summarized in this chart:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/td>\nAverage Word Length<\/span><\/td>\nType-Token Ratio<\/span><\/td>\nHapax Legomena Ratio<\/span><\/td>\nAverage Sentence Length<\/span><\/td>\nAverage Sentence Complexity<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The Murders in the Rue Morgue<\/span><\/td>\n4.75<\/span><\/td>\n0.28<\/span><\/td>\n0.19<\/span><\/td>\n20.53<\/span><\/td>\n3.08<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Berenice<\/span><\/td>\n4.86<\/span><\/td>\n0.43<\/span><\/td>\n0.33<\/span><\/td>\n26.64<\/span><\/td>\n4.13<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The Purloined Letter<\/span><\/td>\n4.78<\/span><\/td>\n0.34<\/span><\/td>\n0.34<\/span><\/td>\n27.87<\/span><\/td>\n4.81<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

When I looked at these individual results, I was surprised to see that \u201cBerenice\u201d (the horror story) and \u201cThe Purloined Letter\u201d (the detective story) were more similar to each other than either was to \u201cThe Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Before doing this analysis, I assumed the two detective stories would be more alike, but that it was possible that the detective story with gothic elements would be more similar to the gothic horror story than to the other detective story. Based on this analysis, it appears that it makes no difference at all whether both are detective stories or both include gothic horror elements, since the horror story and the detective story without any gothic horror elements were most alike. The stylistic fingerprint developed for this project does not appear to be influenced at all by the genre of the work being analyzed (horror vs. detective fiction).<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the distant reading part of this project, I asked my computer science group to\u00a0 create a stylistic fingerprint of \u201cBerenice,” one of Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s horror stories, and of \u201cThe Purloined Letter,” one of his detective stories, to see which was more similar to \u201cThe Murders in the Rue Morgue.” At first glance, the … Continue reading Analysis of Part III – Distant Reading<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4795,"featured_media":0,"parent":300,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-586","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalmethodsforthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalmethodsforthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalmethodsforthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalmethodsforthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4795"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalmethodsforthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalmethodsforthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/586\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalmethodsforthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalmethodsforthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}