Digital Humanities

1&2. Take a test - Was this poem written by a human or a computer?

• Learning Outcome: 

When I first read a poem, I couldn’t tell if it was written by a human or a computer. At first glance, it looked neat, correct, and even a bit emotional. But after reading carefully, I noticed that human-written poems often have a personal touch, with unique ideas, real emotions, and small imperfections that make them feel alive. Computer-written poems, on the other hand, sometimes repeat phrases, use common clichés, or feel a little flat, even though the grammar and structure are perfect. So, in my experience, it’s usually impossible to tell right away—you have to pay attention to the creativity and emotional depth to get a clue.

4. CLiC (Corpus of Literary English) Activities:

Learning Outcomes from My Study of 19th-Century Fictional Speech

During Activities 17.1–17.5, I engaged deeply with the study of fictional dialogue in 19th-century literature, using tools like the CLiC (Corpus of Literary English) to explore how language reflects social, cultural, and moral norms of the time. Through these activities, I gained a comprehensive understanding of how dialogue clusters function in novels, how authors differentiate between character speech and narration, and how historical language compares with contemporary usage.

1. Identification and Analysis of Speech Clusters
   I examined the 15 most frequent speech clusters in the 19C corpus, such as “I should like to know” and “It seems to me that”. These clusters reveal the strategies authors used to convey curiosity, request, refusal, opinion, apology, encouragement, and temporal references. I learned how dialogue in the 19th century was shaped by politeness, social negotiation, and moral reasoning, reflecting both character psychology and societal norms.

2. Comparing Historical and Modern Speech
   By comparing clusters like “It seems to me that” from the 19C corpus with authentic spoken data from the British National Corpus (BNC), I observed both similarities and differences. The function as hedging devices remains consistent, showing care in presenting opinions politely. However, modern speech is more casual, with fillers, repetitions, and interruptions, whereas 19C literature is polished, formal, and structurally complete. This comparison helped me understand the evolution of conversational pragmatics and stylistic conventions.

3. Exploring Jane Austen’s Dialogue
   In examining Austen’s novels, I discovered how she uses clusters not only for communication but as a tool for social negotiation and characterization. Clusters like “I do not mean to” or “I have no doubt of” reflect nuanced politeness, irony, and relational dynamics between characters. Comparing Austen with the broader 19C corpus showed her distinctive emphasis on emotional subtlety and interpersonal interaction, setting her dialogue apart from general novelistic conventions.

4. Character Speech vs. Narrative Voice
   I analyzed differences between character dialogue and authorial narration. Character speech is conversational, interactive, and socially nuanced, while narration is formal, expository, and syntactically complex. For example, dialogue clusters like “What do you think of” function as markers of social negotiation and gossip, whereas narrator clusters maintain narrative structure and moral commentary. This exercise enhanced my understanding of literary techniques in voice differentiation.

5. Social, Cultural, and Moral Insights
   Beyond linguistic patterns, I realized how fictional dialogue mirrors Victorian social norms, etiquette, and moral values. Dialogue clusters serve as tools for expressing agency, asserting opinions, or negotiating social hierarchies. Studying these clusters also revealed the relationship between language and social identity, highlighting gendered and class-based patterns in speech.

Overall Reflection:

Through these activities, I developed strong analytical skills in literary linguistics, corpus analysis, and comparative stylistics. I gained a deeper appreciation for how authors like Jane Austen craft dialogue to reflect character, society, and morality. Additionally, the comparison with modern spoken language provided insights into the continuity and change in conversational practices over time. These exercises have significantly enriched my understanding of 19th-century literature and its relevance to contemporary linguistic and literary studies.

5. Voyant -Activity:

After adding Old Man and the Sea to Voyant Tools, the home page displays an interactive dashboard with visualizations of the text. It shows word frequency, a word cloud, trends over the text, and links between words, allowing users to explore patterns, repetitions, and key themes in an easy-to-understand, visual way.

Using the Stream Graph in Voyant Tools, the text Old Man and the Sea is visualized to show how key words appear and change throughout the story. It highlights patterns, repetitions, and the flow of important terms across different sections, making it easier to see the narrative’s focus and shifts over time.

The Bubbles tool in Voyant Tools displays the most frequent words in Old Man and the Sea as circles of different sizes. Larger bubbles represent words that appear more often, giving a quick visual sense of the main themes and important terms in the text.

The Knots tool in Voyant Tools shows connections between words in Old Man and the Sea. It visualizes how words co-occur or relate to each other, helping to identify key relationships, themes, and patterns in the text.

The Cirrus tool creates a word cloud of Old Man and the Sea, showing the most frequent words in larger fonts. It gives a quick visual overview of the main themes and important words in the text.

The TermsBerry tool displays the most frequent words from Old Man and the Sea as colored bubbles. It visually emphasizes word frequency and importance, making it easy to identify key themes and significant terms in the text.

• Learning Outcome: 

By using Voyant Tools to explore Old Man and the Sea, I learned how to study a text in a visual and interactive way, instead of just reading it. The tool helped me see which words appear most often, which shows the important ideas and themes in the story. I could also see how words are connected to each other and how they appear in different parts of the text. This made it easier to understand the structure of the story, notice patterns, and focus on the main points and ideas Hemingway wanted to show.