Just the Truth: No Context, No Themes, Just the Truth, Just the Words

By Jason Wong, of the Venetian Project Team 

When readers open a book made of leaflets, papyrus, and all the variants of what is called paper, they see words—beautiful, emotional, and culturally sensitive words that parade across pages through what are known as sentences, complete and incomplete.  These sentences craft a passage that holds an axiomatic, self-contained portion of a theme or argument that the whole plot—composed of potentially a hundred passages—revolves around and develops through its hundreds of sentences and thousands of words.  The study of the coherency of these minute details within a text is known in modern day times as a close-reading.  Close-readings entail analyzing various literary devices such as parallelism, diction, rhythm and imagery.  They allow audiences to interpret for themselves what the text is speaking on a more intimate level, without regarding the overall context of the book.  While close-readings are valuable for comprehending a work of literature in searching the depths of a single passage or quote, they engender no new level of inquiry into the piece itself.  Questions raised are questions of old, and some conclusions are only different renditions of another.  But the study of literature has recently progressed to another contemporary front, surprisingly and controversially, by adopting contemporary technologies and espousing the contemporary research of other scholarly disciplines to understand a text from a distant standpoint.  At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Professors Alan Liu and James Donelan of the English Department instructed a class in the Winter Quarter of 2009, in which students were organized into small teams to utilize various technologies in order to construct and discover a novel way of reading a text.  Four of those students, whose project is the subject of this paper, decided to visually re-examine the Shakespearean comedy The Merchant of Venice through the use of digital text analysis tools.

            A plot summary of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is as follows: The Merchant of Venice is a tale set in Italy about lovers who journey through themes of such as faith in terms of trust and religion, the law and economics, and selfishness versus selflessness.  The major plot opens with a depressed Antonio who soon becomes involved in a financial battle with shylock, who hates Antonio and his comrades for their Christian beliefs because he is a Jew.  Meanwhile, Portia seeks her husband, whom she later chooses to be Bassanio, Antonio’s best friend.  Unfortunately, Shylock, after losing his daughter Jessica to the Christian Lorenzo, charges Antonio in court for being unable to fulfill his debts to Shylock, but Portia, disguised as a male lawyer, arrives to his rescue.  Bassanio rewards the disguised Portia with the ring Portia entrusted to him as a symbol of trust in their marriage.  In the end, Portia starts a comedic drama or argument about how Bassanio was unfaithful, but everyone, besides Shylock, eventually reconciles.

            Known as the Venetian Project Team, this group of English students sought to particularly investigate the dynamic character relationships in The Merchant of Venice by using tools such as TagCrowd, WordHoard, and Piespy, which are programs downloadable from the Internet.  These programs facilitated the data collection necessary to perceive the play from a more comprehensive point of view by considering the entireties of the characters’ dialogues.  Their project website features the three modes of data interpretation that they used: single character word frequency analysis, dual-comparative tragic character analysis, and character interaction mapping.  The validity of such an approach derives from the belief that words are a reflection of the heart, the core of a person, so that each character’s words uncover certain truths about the people they are. 

            TagCrowd is a website that counts the word frequencies of an inputted text.  The user pastes a copy of a text of any size into the word box and is able to implement various filtrations, such as grouping similar words or ignoring least frequent words, before clicking Visualize! to produce a literal crowd of words with their number of occurrences attached.  The Venetian Project Team used TagCrowd for the single character word frequency analysis portion of their website, and the dialogues of every single character from the play were copied and pasted into the text analysis tool.  It yielded interesting results.  One example is the analysis of Jessica, Shylock’s disloyal daughter who renounces her Jewish identity to elope with her Christian, soon-to-be husband Lorenzo.  Below is a picture of her word frequency bar graph.

Figure 1. http://117122615686816878-a-1802744773732722657-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/thevenetianproject2/jessica/Jessica%20II.jpg?attredirects=0&auth=ANoY7cphroOjrjJvoJXOta8RQO5g6ZkMuiD7WbhPVc8elGzyFAzVbe41P9GWC5xGureuHg6tr0AYDELRrK0A_nABvoaOeU_3j4bQ-j5xVVAcZc

Her most frequently used words are as follows: “Lorenzo,” “love,” “farewell,” “father,” “Launcelot,” and “night.”  These results are interesting not only because they are consistent with her character but also because they detail her story.  Lorenzo is her boyfriend, and she is almost always speaking to him.  Apparently, her love for Lorenzo is so deeply rooted that she would rather devote herself to him that commit to filial piety.  Her romantic practice of love overshadows her loyalty to her own father.  She escapes with Lorenzo from her home during the night and is more than ready to say farewell to her father.  Her betrayal mirrors that of Launcelot, although her disloyalty is surely more severe. 

Another exciting example is that of Shylock, the tragic figure in The Merchant of Venice.  Specifically, the Venetian Project Team desired to concentrate on him as the single major Jewish character in all of Shakespeare’s play and to illuminate the differences not only between him and other fellow Merchant of Venice characters but also with the Christian and pagan tragic figures in other plays.  For this segment of the website, called the Tragic Character Analysis, WordHoard was used to collect immense amounts of data across plays.  WordHoard is like a complex, expansive, convenient, and multifaceted version of TagCrowd.  Already containing the complete texts to Shakespeare’s plays, the user can search for entire character dialogues and for specific words and parts of speech and can even delve into the more complicated capabilities of the program, such as filtering results to yield information from a certain type of character of certain aspects from a certain type of play.  In this second part of the website, instead of allowing one word frequency graph to stand on its own, two graphs were juxtaposed side by side.  Shylock was subsequently compared and contrasted with the tragic characters of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth based solely on the results of their graphs.  Below is a picture of Hamlet’s and Shylock’s results.

Figure 2. http://sites.google.com/site/thevenetianproject2/tragic-character-analysis/graphShy.jpg?attredirects=0

Figure 3. http://sites.google.com/site/thevenetianproject2/_/rsrc/1236052465880/tragic-character-analysis/graph%20%283%29.jpg?height=323&width=420

            At first, the project team asked themselves about what separated Shylock from the rest, which was obviously his identity as a Jew, which led them to ask the question of whether or not his distinction as a Jewish character still prevails through word frequencies alone.  The data collected confirm that Shylock’s chosen words speak different from those of the other characters.  For example, while Hamlet is contemplative, Shylock is all about taking action and initiating his plans.  Hamlet commonly uses words such as “heaven,” “why,” and “see” because he is in the process of discovering truth and thinking, which stall his actions.  Shylock, however, espouses an aggressive approach, and each of his frequently used words represents his vendetta against the Christians around him.  Based on this juxtaposition as well as on the comparisons with other characters, the team was able to conclude simply through visual portrayals that Shylock suffers a downfall from the society he loathes and despises characters for who they are and not for what they do or will do.  He therefore dies a social death, as opposed to a literal, physical death.  The other tragic characters die literally and hate people for what they do and not for who they are.

            The third and final major feature of analysis on the website is the relationship display, provided by the program known as PieSpy.  Based on the inputted data, PieSpy creates visualizations scene-by-scene of the different character interactions based on who speaks to whom.  Below is a display of the court scene.

Figure 4. http://sites.google.com/site/thevenetianproject2/relationship-display/project5.png?attredirects=0

            Shylock’s tragic moment arrives in the courtroom scene.  For a majority of the time, Shylock thought that he would obtain a pound of Antonio’s flesh as a compensation for the unpaid debts.  However, Portia comes in as a skilled and astute lawyer who deconstructs Shylock’s charges so much that they are not only annulled but also backfired on himself.  In the picture shown above, Gratiano and the Duke sort of seem like observers in the court as they are supporters of Portia and marveling at her brilliance.  Bassanio and Antonio form a triangle with Portia, which represents the prevalent competition between loves throughout the play.  Finally, Portia serves as Shylock’s only connection, illustrating his loneliness and alienation especially since Portia is only there to destroy him.  The PieSpy graphs add a new element of visual representation by illustrating a sky view portrayal of the interactions that take place in a single scene, which is a point of view easily neglected in reading from a play script because all the attention is placed upon the dialogue and not on acting direction or character placement.

            Audiences might argue that these impersonal, technology tools eliminate the emotional aspects of experiencing literature.  They might say that close-readings invoke a more specific and more accurate interpretation of the small details within a story.  Surely, these tools do not substitute the basic function of privately reading, for example, a novel, but surely these tools also do not eliminate the emotional aspects of experiencing literature.  Technology itself is an amazing concept, and the advancement of technology continues to extend the scope of human invention and imagination.  The emotional experience of reading a novel, for instance, while it may already be deep, is significantly widened thanks to the capabilities of seeing things from a technological viewpoint.  Technology widens the experience because it brings in a whole new level of coherency to literature.  The Venetian Project Team succeeded in creating a website that offers readers of The Merchant of Venice a new insight rarely recognized in high schools, colleges, and universities, and these burgeoning new approaches to analyzing literature bridges the study of literature with the wider world.              

Works Cited

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. NY, New York: Verso, 2007.

Shakespeare, William. Merchant of Venice. New York , New York. Penguin Group, 1999.

The Venetian Project. Google Sites - Free websites and wikis. 13 Mar. 2009  <http://sites.google.com/site/thevenetianproject2/>.