Wine Dark Sea | literary and cultural history at the level of the sentence

Mapping the ‘Whole’ of Early Modern Drama

By Beth Ralston | Published: March 26, 2015

We’re currently working with two versions of our drama corpus: the earlier version contains 704 texts, while the later one has 554, the main distinction being that the later corpus has a four-way genre split – tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, and history – while the earlier corpus also includes non-dramatic texts like dialogues, entertainments, interludes, and masques. Recently we’ve been doing PCA experiments with the 704 corpus to see what general patterns emerge, and to see how the non-dramatic genres pattern in the data. The following are a few of the PCA visualisations generated from this corpus, which provide a general overview of the data. We produced the diagrams here using JMP. The spreadsheets of the 704 and 554 corpora are included below as excel files – please note we are still working on the metadata.

704 corpus

554 corpus

Overview (click to enlarge images):

This is the complete data set visualised in PCA space. All 704 plays are included, but LATs with frequent zero values have been excluded.

Genre:

If we highlight the genres, it looks like this:

Comedies = red

Dialogues = green

Entertainments = blue

Histories = orange

Interludes = blue-green

Masques = dark purple

Non-dramatics = mustard

Tragicomedies = dark turquoise

Tragedies = pink-purple

If we tease this out even more – hiding, but not excluding, the non-dramatic genres – there is a clear diagonal divide between tragedies (red) and comedies (blue):

[Michael Witmore, Jonathan Hope, and Michael Gleicher, forthcoming, ‘Digital Approaches to the Language of Shakespearean Tragedy’, in Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk, eds, The Oxford Handbook of ShakespeareanTragedy (Oxford)]

With tragicomedies (green) and histories (purple) falling in the middle:

It seems that tragedies and comedies are characterised by sets of opposing LATs. The LATs associated with comedy are those capturing highly oral language behaviour, while those associated with tragedy capture negative language and psychological states. Tragicomedies and histories – although we have yet to investigate them in detail – seem to occupy an intermediate space. If we unhide the non-dramatic genres, we can see how they pattern in comparison.

In spite of their name, dialogues are not comprised of rapid exchanges (e.g. Oral Cues, Direct Address, First Person etc., the LATs which make up the comedic side of the PCA space) but instead have lengthy monologues, which might explain why they fall mostly on the side of the tragedies:

Entertainments do not seem to be linguistically similar to each other:

Interludes, on the other hand, seem to occupy a more tightly defined linguistic space:

Masques are pulled towards the left of the PCA space:

Authorship:

Docuscope was designed to identify genre, rather than authorship, so perhaps we should not be surprised that authorship comes through less clearly than genre in these initial trials. We should also bear in mind that there are only 9 genres in the corpus, compared to approximately 200 authors.

This, for example, shows only the tragedies – all other genres are hidden – and each author is represented by a different colour:

We get a clearer picture when considering a smaller group in relation to the whole – for example, one author compared to all the others. Take Seneca, for example – demonstrated by the purple squares:

From this we can deduce that Seneca’s tragedies are linguistically similar, as they are grouped tightly together.

Date:

The same applies for looking at date of writing across the corpus, with approximately 100 dates to consider.

This can be visualised on a continuous scale, e.g. the lighter the dot, the earlier the play; the darker the dot, the later the play. While this has a nice ‘heat map’ effect, it is difficult to interpret:

If we narrow this down to three groups of dates – early (red), central (yellow), and late (maroon) – it becomes a little easier to read. As with the Seneca example, the fewer factors there are to consider, the clearer the visualisations become:

Posted in Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare, Visualizing English Print (VEP) | Leave a comment

‘the size of it all carries us along’ – a new kind of literary history?

By Jonathan Hope | Published: November 30, 2014

HCAS SYMPOSIUM: BIG DATA APPROACHES TO INTELLECTUAL AND LINGUISTIC HISTORY 1–2 DECEMBER 2014

Helsinki http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/events/big-data/

references and links for a presentation by Jonathan Hope

pdf of slides Hope Helsinki 2014

title

‘the size of it all carries us along’

This Heat, ‘A New Kind of Water’, from Deceit (1981, Rough Trade)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLMoDU9Tl_E

part 1

Early Modern Print: Text Mining Early Printed English

(Anupam Basu et al.: Humanities Digital Workshop, Washington University, St Louis)

http://earlyprint.wustl.edu

‘accommodated’

William Garrard, The Art of War 1591

Robert Barret, Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres 1598

part 2

Visualising English Print: 1450-1800

(Mike Gleicher Wisconsin-Madison U, Michael Witmore Folger Shakespeare Library, Jonathan Hope Strathclyde U)

general: http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/VEPsite/

Ubiq: http://vep.cs.wisc.edu/ubiq/

Serendip: http://vep.cs.wisc.edu/serendip/

forthcoming papers on the material presented in this section of the talk:

Anupam Basu, Jonathan Hope, and Michael Witmore, ‘Networks and Communities in the Early Modern Theatre’, in Roger Sell and Anthony Johnson (eds), Community-making in Early Stuart Theatres: Stage and Audience (Ashgate)

Michael Witmore, Jonathan Hope, and Michael Gleicher, ‘Digital Approaches to the Language of Shakespearean Tragedy’, in Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy (Blackwell)

references:

Ted Underwood, 2013, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies(Stanford UP)

Goldstone, Andrew, and Ted Underwood, 2014, ‘The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us’, New Literary History https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/49323

Ted Underwood, 2014, ‘Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago’, Representations <http://hdl.handle.net/2142/50034>.

Alan B. Farmer (forthcoming), ‘Playbooks and the Question of Ephemerality’

Lucy Munro, 2013, Archaic Style in English Literature (CUP)

Posted in Early Modern Drama, Uncategorized, Visualizing English Print (VEP) | Leave a comment

The Novel and Moral Philosophy 3: What Does Lennox Do with Moral Philosophy Words?

By Michael Witmore | Published: October 26, 2014

The previous two posts explored how an eighteenth century novel uses words from an associated topic to fulfill, and perhaps shape, the expectations of an audience looking to immerse themselves in a life as it is lived. In this post I want to think a little more about the idea that the red words identified by Serendip’s topic model do something exclusively “novel-like” and that the blue words are exclusively “philosophical.” Both sets of words seem, rather, to aim at a common target, since each contributes something distinctive to the common project of rendering a moral perspective on lived experience. I want to caution against thinking of these topics as “signatures” of different genres; they may instead index narrative strategies that criss-cross different types of writing.

Take, for example, the passage from Lennox’s Euphemia that appears toward the bottom of the screen shot below:

SnipImage8

After relating several details about her relationship with her aunt and uncle, Maria concludes: “BEING in this unfavourable disposition towards me, he [Sir John] was easily persuaded to press me to a marriage, in which my in|clinations were much less consulted than my interests.” This sentence illustrates some of the dynamics that Park described in her earlier post. On the one hand, Maria’s letter immerses the reader in a scene from life, rendering vivid the circumstances that led her uncle to make a fateful decision about Maria’s marriage prospects. Yet at the same time, the narrator dips frequently into the vocabulary of a more removed and somewhat static moral judgment – one that appraises “circumstance” in relation to “actions” and “interest.” The red words, novelistic in our analysis, are the words that show us how something happened: Maria’s uncle Sir John decided to force her into “marriage,” ignoring his niece’s wishes or inclinations because he was in an “unfavourable” disposition that made him more easily “persuaded” to this course of action. (We are getting contextual details – backstory – that make his decision intelligible.) These red, novelistic topic words – marriage, persuaded, unfavorable – are thus necessary for rendering the sequence of events that prompted her change of fortunes. A man was persuaded, his favor had changed, and a marriage ensued.

But the narrative sequence opens up onto a more general possibility for analysis. An abstract noun – “interest” – is offered as the nominal criterion for her uncle’s decision, but in the context of the sentence it seems to gloss the uncle’s reasoning as he might represent it to Maria (“this marriage is in your interest”), not the narrator’s feelings about that reasoning (“it was in my interest”). What we are getting, then, is the narrator’s view of how her uncle made his decision, what circumstances contributed to his thinking, even the abstract concept that he could have invoked in the absence of any residual “natural” sympathy for his niece’s inclinations. One sees, perhaps, a tension between the kinds of abstract nouns that appear in works of moral philosophy – in the screen shot above, “natural” “actions” “circumstance” “interest” – and the concrete terms of relation that render action for us in a more vivid, immediate way.

What is interesting about this passage is that it shows us how flexible the abstract vocabulary of moral philosophy can be when it is introduced into the narrative stream of a novel. In the passage above, Maria tells us that her aunt, Lady Harley, was stung by jealousy when she witnessed Sir John’s pleasure at hearing his niece read. Out of spite, the aunt insinuates that there is a contradiction between the “oppression and faintness” that Maria purportedly has complained of and her manifestly good spirits, which Sir John would otherwise take on face value. Maria then uses the abstract noun “circumstance” to characterize the fact of her good spirits, a fact which Sir John is now (culpably) discounting.

The shift in register becomes necessary because Sir John has abandoned his natural sympathy for Maria and is instead bringing a quasi-judicial process of weighing her actions (thinking “circumstantially”). It’s the intermixture of these fragments of moral reasoning with images of life as it unfolds – a didactic mix of abstract nouns and personal actions – that are allowing Lennox to stage distinct layers of sympathy and indifference, serving them all up for the reader’s observation. The shift to moral evaluation is even more decisive in the following passage from letter V, in which Maria tells Euphemia how Sir James came to doubt her aunt’s deprecations and once again view his niece in a favorable light:

Maria is moving into the realm of generalization (“I have often observed…”), and this shift requires the writer to “investigate” the ways in which Sir James was led to “compare” Maria’s behavior with a secondhand “picture” that has been drawn of her “disposition” by her aunt. These blue words might be seen as pivots in a process of moral judgment – the same process that the novel’s reader had to employ in evaluating Sir James’ earlier souring on his niece. Because this process itself is now the subject of narration, it is not surprising that the vocabulary needs to be more structured and abstract.

In using Serendip to explore how Euphemia behaves linguistically qua novel, then, we must start with the idea that novels mix the vocabularies of these two topics in order to layer points of view and to involve the reader, experientially, in a world where actions have moral significance. Moral philosophy words (blue) are important because they mark occasions where that state of experiential immersion has been temporarily deflected onto some explicitly moralizing, explicitly generalizing consciousness, a consciousness which may or may not be that of the narrator. Regardless of its origin, the capacity of that consciousness to withdraw temporarily from the particulars of the narrative and to render judgment on a kind of act seems a crucial aspect of the novel’s program, which Julie Park described in her previous post in terms of the novel’s epistolarity and emphasis on sensibility.

We can say, moreover, that this procedure of mixing words from these two topics also occurs in formal works of moral philosophy. Consider the passage from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments below:

In this passage, Smith is describing the way in which a man – any man whatever – will alter his treatment of his friends if suddenly elevated in social status. Such a man becomes insolent and petulant, which is why Smith believes that one should slow one’s social rise whenever possible. “He is happiest,” Smith writes, “who advances more gradually to greatness, whom the public destines to every step of his preferment long before he arrives at it…” Smith is encouraging his audience to pass judgment on a drama whose characters are never rendered concrete, characters whose actions illustrate a concept. The closest Smith gets to a novelistic treatment of the life world occurs just after he has presented his maxim above. Instead of calculating and re-calculating one’s standing among friends, Smith writes, one should find “satisfaction in all the little occurrences of common life, in the company with which we spent the evening last night.” Smith modulates into the red here, drawing words from the life world as if he himself is reporting on events in his own life just the night before, events which ground and so justify the moral pleasure he takes in them precisely because they are not bloodless and calculating. Smith has, for a sentence or two, become an epistolary novelist, and it is this sudden (and relatively rare) excursion into the every day – the world of “last night” – that allows him to show the difference between happiness and its opposite.

As an excursion, this passage has to be brief. There is “a lot of blue” in moral philosophy because, as philosophy, it needs to be systematic – indifferent, in other words, to the most particular details of the life world. But the subject of this philosophy is certainly the stuff of novels: dramas of sympathy, judgments of circumstances and the precise analysis of the qualities and intentions suffusing different acts (including the quality of failing to be concrete in one’s observations). If the burden of system building were relaxed, Smith too might write volubly about the “satisfactions” one finds “in the little occurrences of common life.”

Posted in Visualizing English Print (VEP) | Tagged Adam Smith, Charlotte Lennox, Euphemia, moral philosophy, sentiment, Theory of Moral Sentiments | Comments closed

The Novel and Moral Philosophy 2: Telling and Feeling, Aunts and Letters

By Julie Park | Published: October 25, 2014

Before I begin commenting on what I see in Serendip’s findings, I think it is worth providing some general information about the work from which the screen shot below is taken. The author, Charlotte Lennox (1730-1804), is most known for her novel The Female Quixote (1752), a picaresque about a romance addict who perpetually confuses the plots of the novels she reads as reality itself. Euphemia (1790), the last novel Lennox (1730-1804) published before she died, unfolds its narrative through the 12-year correspondence between two friends, Maria Harley and Euphemia Neville. The young women are separated by Euphemia’s move to colonial America with her husband, a British lieutenant. As a domestic novel, Euphemia devotes part of its narrative to depicting the unhappiness of this marriage. The novel is also remarkable for its depiction of American colony life in the province of New York during the middle of the eighteenth century from a British female perspective. In this novel and in her earlier Harriot Stuart (1750), Lennox drew on her own experience of growing up in colonial Albany. True to epistolary format, individual letters from the correspondents organize the novel, rather than chapters. The screenshot I am commenting on comes from Letter II.

When looking at the screen shot of Euphemia labeled TEXT: K062108.001 above, I saw what Witmore saw: words identifying social titles such as “Sir” and “Lady,” as well as family relations such as “aunt,” score highest as novel words. Yet there are slight distinctions between the familial words themselves. While “aunt” is shaded most deeply as a novel word, “uncle” is a shade lighter, and “daughter” is a shade lighter still.

The obvious conclusion to draw from these slight distinctions of shading is that the word “aunt” appears more frequently in novels than the word “uncle,” and the word “uncle” features more in novels than the word “daughter.” This is not to say, though, that eighteenth-century novels are more about aunts and uncles than about daughters. In fact a number of them are about or feature female characters that are at the stage in their lives where they are transitioning from being daughters to wives, and the novels themselves have the didactic purpose of educating female readers. In this regard, I think it’s important to recognize that topic word frequency might tell a different story from the frequency of a topic itself. The distribution of words in a topic matters.

Other high scoring novel words are “told” and “dear.” Both words in themselves are interesting to me as they are highly suggestive of the eighteenth-century novel’s history. “Dear,” for instance, is doubly significant in that history. It is a word that can be used to convey affectionate regard for someone when referring to or addressing them, or to address someone at the beginning of a letter. Both senses of the words are used on this page. Why does Serendip mark the word “dear” so intensely red in both cases?

The word “dear,” in its guise of addressing or referring to someone with affection, registers the age of sensibility in which the novel genre developed. (It does so without being an invention of the epistolary novel.) Sensibility celebrated the ready expression of sympathy and feeling for other humans as a mark of high moral standing as well as social prestige. It promoted a language pattern that displays one’s emotional disposition towards another, such as attaching the word “dear” as a term of endearment to someone’s name. In its function of representing social relations between characters in day-to-day contexts, the eighteenth-century novel would inevitably capture such language patterns. As a popular medium of entertainment, the novel promulgated the patterns further. One might argue that the rise of the novel was in itself a major factor in sensibility’s growth and development as a pervasive cultural movement.

On the other hand, the word “dear” as a form of address used to begin a letter is also a high scorer as a novel word. Like the other usage of the word, it is invariably attached to a proper name, or the role of an identified person, such as “friend.” The first canonical novel to spur the cultural movement of sensibility was an epistolary novel, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. So influential was this novel on the development of the novel genre, literary historians of the early 20^th century identified it as the “first novel” written in English. This passage from Richardson’s Pamela (volume III, letter II) displays the same pattern observed in Euphemia:

A high number of eighteenth-century novels were written as epistolary narratives. Fiction that presented a series of letters written from the point of view of a character created a sense of intimacy and immediate involvement with narrative events in recognizably day-to-day contexts. Such experiences were not available in earlier forms of literature. This is one of the reasons why epistolary narrative was such a novel (new-seeming) and popular genre for eighteenth-century readers, and why it was conducive to the flourishing of sensibility in eighteenth-century culture.

A key moment in the novel takes place when one of the main characters, Mr. B., undergoes a conversion from villainous sexual aggressor to loving suitor of the heroine because he was so “moved” by the letters to her parents in which she details her ordeals: “O my dear girl! you have touched me sensibly with your mournful tale, and your reflections upon it.” Likewise, eighteenth-century readers were “sensibly touched” by Pamela’s letters—the very letters that make up the novel—to the extent that they could not get enough of the style of fiction in which they appeared. Eighteenth-century fiction writers imitated Pamela’s epistolary format as well as theme of “virtue in distress” for several more decades of the remaining century. It is no surprise, then, that in the epistolary novel Euphemia (1790) by Charlotte Lennox (a novelist Richardson whom admired and supported), Serendip is picking up on “dear,” used as a form of address in beginning a letter, and as a more general novel topic word that appears over and over again.

It should not be surprising that the word “told” is picked up as a high scoring novel topic word as well. Telling is an activity of narration, and the novel itself is a narrative genre:

Narratives in eighteenth-century novels often involve the revelation of stories about unhappy or unfortunate events that happened in the past, events that affect the characters of the novel. This is certainly the case with Gothic novels, which derive their narrative tensions and conflicts from the inadvertent uncovering of long suppressed criminal events and actions. For instance, the epigraph for Ann Radcliffe’s non-epistolary Gothic novel, A Sicilian Romance, is a line from Hamlet spoken by Hamlet’s father: “I could a tale unfold.” In an epistolary narrative, where the fictional letter writer is reporting to the addressee what has already happened, the act of telling would be in the past tense, “told.”

“Telling,” as Stuart Sherman reminds us in Telling Time,is not only what narratives do (they tell what happens in time), but also what clocks do with time. The fact that Serendip shades “hour” a deep red conveys the time-specific quality of narrative during this period, its concern with the quotidian and the everyday above all. A sentence from the screenshot of a page from Lennox’s Euphemia certainly captures this sense of “hour”: “She complains of a pain in her breast; of shortness of breath; and declares, that when she has read to you an hour or two, she feels as if she was ready to expire with a strange oppression and faintness.” In this sentence, the quotidian context of the word “hour” is strikingly apparent in its connection to the experience of a character’s body at a specific moment in time.

The very premise of epistolary correspondence is to overcome not just spatial distance, but also temporal disconnection. The letter-writer wants to replace one’s absence from another’s life with a sense of living through the same experiences one has had by retelling those moments through the medium of the letter. By being specific about time—how long things take by the hour, for instance (“when she has read to you an hour or two”), this sense of intimacy with someone else’s everyday experiences becomes possible.

In shading darkly those words that denote familial relations and social standing (aspects of subjectivity that render oneself legible in day-to-day social settings), as well as words related to conventions of epistolary and emotional address such as “dear,” as well as words signifying temporality, such as “hour,” Serendip picks up on the novel’s reality effects. It picks up, in other words, the features of eighteenth-century novels that defined its groundbreaking method of realism.

Even as it confirms and reinforces critical commonplaces about the novel’s generic markers—especially those concerning its status as a unique mediator for realism, verisimilitude and individual personhood—Serendip also reveals generic tendencies that have not been so well-covered by literary historians. The words shaded blue—or, the words strongly related to moral philosophy—indicate this. Scholars such as Ian Watt have argued that the novel’s generic identity lies in the way it represents experience through seventeenth-century epistemologies, such as the subjectivism of René Descartes and the empiricism of John Locke. These philosophical tendencies are already apparent in the novel words—red-shaded—I have commented on above; the words all relate to the assumption that events and experiences derive from subjective standpoints, and are realizable through their placement on the time-space continuum.

However, the words shaded blue by Serendip reveal another level of philosophical realism in that they come out of a vocabulary of moral philosophy that Serendip helps us to recognize. What I notice about these words is that they are abstract nouns and impersonal words that are detached or detachable from human agents. They are also adjectives or adverbs that relate to philosophical measurements such as “natural,” “perfect,” “perfectly” and impersonal seeming actions, such as “enumerate” and “produced.”

I also notice that some “moderate” or “light” novel words—words shaded medium or light red as opposed to dark red—do not seem as if they would be out of place in the list of philosophy words from moral philosophy texts. These include “mind,” “consequence,” “opinion,” “life,” and such abstract nominalizations as “viewing” and “disposition.” (Indeed, given the way that the topic model works, some of these words would at times belong to that topic, but that is for Eric and Mike to explain in a future post.) This notable tendency toward abstraction in the novel might express some historically distinctive formality of social language in eighteenth-century England, or even a higher state of fusion, during this time, between works of fiction and non-fiction, or both. We should investigate these possibilities a more focused way, perhaps with some of the techniques we are getting a glimpse of here.

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The Novel and Moral Philosophy 1: What Does Charlotte Lennox Have to Do with Adam Smith?

By Eric Alexander and Michael Witmore | Published: October 23, 2014

The Visualizing English Print group is using new visualization tools to study genre dynamics in our corpus of texts spanning the years 1530-1799. While far from comprehensive, the corpus spans an interesting period in the history of English print. Most literary historians, for example, would agree that this is the period when the novel emerges as a distinct generic form. One of the tools we are using – a re-orderable matrix and topic modeling tool called Serendip – has generated topics that illuminate this development in our corpus. We began that work by first labeling all 1080 items by genre, something we had to do if we were going to see any patterns in the larger collection. (A downloadable spreadheet of both the items and the genre labels applied to them appears in a spreadsheet here.) This post deals with two algorithmically generated topics that we found useful in identifying items we had previously labeled “prose fiction” and “philosophy.” The topics were generated through a process known as Latent Derichlet Allocation (LDA), a technique commonly used to sort through web pages or documents in large collections of texts.

In exploring the VEP corpus with Serendip, we saw that our prose fiction texts – particularly the eighteenth century novels – were related to our philosophy texts in some interesting ways. We began to understand that relationship when we noticed that prose fiction and philosophy texts shared the topics that are present in large measure in each of them individually. (A topic is a collection of words that tend to co-occur with one another in individual documents; one might think of them as “ingredients” that are mixed together to create the full variety of documents in the corpus.) The first of these topics was characteristically present in texts classed as prose fiction, which was reasonably interesting. More interesting still: we found that the type of texts next most likely to contain words from this “prose fiction” topic were those we classed as “philosophy.” And the topic that was most prevalent in philosophy texts – in this case, works of moral philosophy by thinkers such as Smith and Hume – were also present in our prose fiction novels.

Why this overlap or sharing of ingredients? Where does the novel stop and moral philosophy begin? Before attempting an answer, it is important to understand what kinds of works qualified, in our naming game, for membership in these two groups. A complete list of works in the corpus, with their genre classes, can be found at the link above. Below we list only the works in these two classes. Our naming convention begins with a date of publication, short title of the work, author, and assigned genre class. Our dates here refer to the date of the edition transcribed by TCP in a corpus assembled at random: per our earlier post on the corpus, it is composed of 40 randomly selected texts per decade. The corpus was thus specifically not created for the purpose of exhaustive surveying any one literary form. Our purpose, rather, was to see how much we could learn from a relatively small sample of what TCP had transcribed.

Fictional Prose:

1588 PandostoTriumphOfTime Greene, Robert, 1558-1592
1639 MoresUtopia More, Thomas
1634 StrangeMetamorphosisOfMan Brathwait, Richard, 1588?-1673
1667 LovingEnemyATrueHistory Camus, Jean-Pierre, 1584-1652.|Wright, John
1659 GovernmentOfWorldInMoon Cyrano de Bergerac, 1619-1655.|St. Serfe, Thomas, fl. 1668
1668 LifeOfMeritonLatroon Head, Richard, 1637?-1686?
1680 TheEnglishRoguePart2 Head, Richard, 1637?-1686?
1700 HistoryOfChildrenInTheWood
1572 SchoolOfWiseConceits Blague, Thomas, d. 1611
1759 PoliticalRomanceToYork Sterne, Laurence, 1713-1768
1799 TisAllForTheBest More, Hannah, 1745-1833
1724 HistoryOfJohnOfBourbon Aulnoy, Madame d’ (Marie-Catherine), 1650 or 51-1705
1753 SirCharlesGrandisonV1 Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
1753 SirCharlesGrandisonV5 Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
1749 TomJonesV1 Fielding, Henry, 1707-1754
1749 TomJonesV3 Fielding, Henry, 1707-1754
1789 Arundel Cumberland, Richard, 1732-1811
1712 AppendixToJohnBull Arbuthnot, John, 1667-1735
1797 FantomNewFashionedPhilosopher More, Hannah, 1745-1833
1748 RoderickRandomV2 Smollett, Tobias George, 1721-1771
1748 ClarissaV1 Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
1751 ClarrissaV8 Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
1777 CharlesCharlotteV1 Pratt, Mr. (Samuel Jackson), 1749-1814
1777 CharlesCharlotteV2 Pratt, Mr. (Samuel Jackson), 1749-1814
1764 CastleOfOtranto Walpole, Horace, 1717-1797
1763 HistoryLadyJuliaMadeville Brooke, Frances, 1724?-1789
1794 AdventuresOfHughTrevor Holcroft, Thomas, 1745-1809
1790 JuliaNovelAndPoems Williams, Helen Maria, 1762-1827
1752 FemaleQuixote Lennox, Charlotte, ca. 1729-1804
1758 HenriettaTwoVolumes Lennox, Charlotte, ca. 1729-1804
1790 EuphemiaFourVolumes Lennox, Charlotte, ca. 1729-1804
1782 CeciliaV3 Burney, Fanny, 1752-1840
1782 CeciliaV5 Burney, Fanny, 1752-1840
1741 PamelaV3 Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
1741 PamelaV4 Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
1785 RecessTaleOfOtherTimes Lee, Sophia, 1750-1824
1795 HenryFourVolumes Cumberland, Richard, 1732-1811
1776 PupilOfPleasure Pratt, Mr. (Samuel Jackson), 1749-1814
1753 ShakespeareIllustrated Lennox, Charlotte, ca. 1729-1804
1792 AnnaStIvesNovel Holcroft, Thomas, 1745-1809
1766 VicarOfWakefieldTale Goldsmith, Oliver, 1730?-1774
1788 MusicalTourMrDibdin Dibdin, Charles, 1745-1814
1775 LiberalOpinionsAnecdotes Pratt, Mr. (Samuel Jackson), 1749-1814

Philosophy:

1534 ErasmusAgainstWar Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536
1532 DespisingTheWorld Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536.|Paynell, Thomas
1531 TreatiseSufferFriendsDeath Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536
1590 RoyalExchangeAphorisms Rinaldi, Oraziofin /upd.|Greene, Robert, 1558?-1592
1614 LabyrinthOfMansLife Norden, John, 1548-1625?
1576 AnatomyOfTheMind Rogers, Thomas, d. 1616
1580 PatternOfAPassionateMind Rogers, Thomas, d. 1616.|Rogers, Thomas, d. 1616.|H. W
1561 CicerosFiveQuestions Cicero, Marcus Tullius.|Dolman, John
1675 FreedomOfWill Sterry, Peter, 1613-1672
1741 EveryManHisOwnWayEpistle Duck, Stephen, 1705-1756
1752 TheRambler Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784
1740 TreatiseHumanNatureAbstract Hume, David, 1711-1776
1741 EssaysMoralAndPolitical Hume, David, 1711-1776
1759 EpistlesPhilosphicalAndMoral Kenrick, W. (William), 1725?-1779
1734 EssaysOnSeveralSubjects Forbes of Pitsligo, Alexander Forbes, Lord, 1678-1762
1751 EssaysOnTheCharacteristics Brown, John, 1715-1766
1759 TheoryMoralSentimentsSmith Smith, Adam, 1723-1790
1734 EssayonMan Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744.]

A look at these lists confirms that our corpus contains significant examples of both the eighteenth-century novel (Richardson, Burney, Lennox) and important texts in the history of moral philosophy, for example, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Noting these landmarks, we want now to explore this overlap in vocabularies and share some preliminary thoughts about why novels share the vocabulary of moral philosophy and how those vocabularies function in each genre.

The next three posts are structured as a dialogue, beginning with some remarks by Michael Witmore (a Serendip user) and Eric Alexander (Serendip’s designer). These remarks focus on how Serendip helped them to pinpoint this kinship between the two genres. In the next post, we have a “reaction” from a scholar of the Eighteenth Century Novel, Julie Park, who was recently a fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library where Serendip was tested. Her post, entitled “Telling and Feeling, Aunts and Letters,” introduces some historical context for the development of the eighteenth century novel, moving on to show how the topic words associated with the prose fiction texts contribute to the latter’s project of rendering everyday life and moral sensibility for readers. Park offers specific readings of some of the topic words that Serendip flagged as highly present of our clusters of topic words, offering the perspective of a new user/interpreter on the results produced by a software tool still in development. In a final post entitled “What Does Lennox Do with Moral Philosophy Words?” Witmore expands on Park’s analysis, offering an interpretation of the differences between the two topical fields we are associating with the novel and moral philosophy.

Serendip

We begin with a few words about what Serendip is and how it works. At its highest level, Serendip allows users to visualize how topics are distributed across a document set. “Topics,” in this instance, are significant collections of words (extracted by an algorithm known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation, or LDA) that tend to occur in the same documents across a corpus. Serendip displays the occurrence of these topics in a re-orderable matrix that plots documents, in the vertical axis, against topics, in the horizontal axis, indicating individual proportions with circular glyphs of varying size. Documents can be displayed individually or in aggregate groups. After some tuning by Alexander, who is the original designer of Serendip, a user (in this case, Witmore) takes the tool and begins to explore these topics, looking at what words they contain and what texts score highest on each topic. The power of the tool is the ability it gives its user to re-order the matrix according to individual topics, texts, or text groups.

We are not going to discuss how topic modeling works in this post. (A good explanation can be found on Ted Underwood’s blog.) We do want to show something that happened when we began exploring this corpus using the topics that had been generated for us. You’ll see several screen shots below. For the time being, focus on the center pane with the yellow circles that look like planets. Across the top are the topics, which were named according to Witmore’s best guess at what they captured in texts. (Naming topics is a task that seems to have been designed for human beings: the judgments are highly contextual and built upon the study of examples.) Witmore’s topic names were based, first, on his examination of the word distribution in that topic (the window at right labeled “Novel”), but also on his knowledge of the works displayed in the lower right hand pane. (The lower right hand pane displays individual texts within a given subgroup of texts – here the ones that our bibliographer had labeled “prose fiction”). A lot of this is subjective, which is as it should be.

On this screen, Witmore had selected the topic which he had named “Novel” at the top left portion of the page and then re-ordered the matrix to show all of the genre types which contain those topic words. (The genres are listed vertically in descending order down the red column at left.) The size of these circles represents the frequency with which this topic occurs in a given group of texts; additional information about outliers is furnished by the Saturn-like rings. We can also disaggregate this group and see how individual texts score on this topic, again in descending order:

Witmore’s initial name for this topic was “Novel,” which seems to accord well with the actual texts that are highly rated on this topic: Charlotte Lennox’s Henrietta, followed by two parts of a Richardson novel, a few dramas, and then more novels by Lennox and Richardson. Knowing that he needed to consult an expert, he decided to talk to Julie Park, a scholar of eighteenth century literature, whom he hoped could help him understand this topic. The initial identification of this topic, however, seemed right given that the matrix in the previous screenshot identifies texts classed as “Fictional Prose,” “Autobiography,” “Drama,” “Travelogue,” and “Biography” as high scorers on this topic. (“Legal Prose,” not so much, which is all for the good.)

Neither Witmore nor Park was surprised to see that the words making up the “Novel” topic (mr, mrs, lady, madam, sir, miss, dear) occur frequently in epistolary novels, which make up a large proportion of this group. For structural reasons, the narrative voice of epistolary novels must register and mark an awareness of addressee (Mr., Sir, etc.); letters also recount dialogue (and so, once again, use terms of address and quotational words like “cried,” “told,” “replied,”). The drama of these novels is a social one; we are not surprised to find words that tag an individual’s social standing. (Technical terms from geometry or botany are not featured high on this list, for example.) The initial finding suggested to us that we were operating in the same universe as the tool; it was doing things we understood.

But you can always know what you know in new ways and you can also try to describe that knowledge in different terms. This is what we were interested in doing with the tool that Eric had built. Re-ordering was the next step in the process.

Look now at a second re-ordering of the matrix, this time on the basis of a topic named “Moral Philosophy” which is the third column to the right in light blue. The topic words here are obviously abstract – the highest scorers are words like “object,” “mankind,” “idea,” “system” – but further down the list, they seem to focus on the dynamics of moral deliberation. “Sentiment,” “moral,” “characters,” “propriety” and “sentiments” are all words that seem useful in this context. (One never knows for sure how words are going together or behaving, of course, until one sees these words working in a text.) Here again, the ratings of genre groups in descending order seemed plausible, beginning with “Philosophy” and then moving through “Argumentation” and other forms of “Nonfiction Prose.”

We get an even better sense when we rate items on this topic at a more granular level, going work by work in descending order. The “Moral Philosophy” topic – the blue, leftmost column – is now rating individual works:

An abstract of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature is the top scorer here, and a little further down one sees Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Calling this topic “Moral Philosophy” rather than “Natural Philosophy” or “Metaphysics” was seeming like the right move.

Now look at what happens when we re-organize the matrix according to the human generated genre designations on the left hand side – essentially asking which computer generated topics a human designated genre group is made up of. Returning to a view that shows us the groups down the left hand side, we re-ordered the matrix according to the topic scores of texts that a human being has classified as “Fictional Prose:”

“Fictional Prose” texts are, as a group, rated horizontally on their prevalent topics, again in descending order, now from right to left. What we are seeing now are the topics of which “Fictional Prose” texts are generally composed. The first one listed is “Novel,” to which we say, “so far, so good.” But look just to the right. Going next in sequence, we see that “Moral Philosophy” has moved across the screen to become the second most highly ranked topic for this type of text, followed closely by another topic named “Tales of Chance and Virtue.”

Now things become interesting. Why would prose fictional texts, largely epistolary and high scorers on the “Novel” topic, also be associated with the “Moral Philosophy” topic? What does Charlotte Lennox do that Adam Smith does as well?

To answer this question, we needed to begin looking at the topic words in context, which we did through Serendip’s ability to drill down into the documents, allowing us to view passages. We generated several views of the texts that showed texts by Charlotte Lennox and Adam Smith with topic words highlighted in different colors (red for the novel, blue for moral philosophy). To get a sense of what the “novel” words in red are actually doing in context, we asked Julie Park to produce the reflection that follows in the next post, which begins with an analysis of novel words in Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia. We also furnished her with several screenshots of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, since this text contained a significant number of topic words that we are associating with moral philosophy. We post here a few screenshots of each work as a preface to the next installment.

Posted in Visualizing English Print (VEP) | Tagged Adam Smith, Charlotte Lennox, Euphemia, novel, Theory of Moral Sentiments | Comments closed

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