Visualizing Tolkien
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Visualizing Tolkien
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Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#2rather:
Wasting time and attention on useless statistics and pointless visualizations.
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#3I think the author should have filtered out stopwords. The big "The" in the middle of the visualization seems kind of obvious. It would be much more interesting to see the words that make this text different from other english texts.
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#4Where's the sentence length statistics? Average word length? Commas per sentence? All are surely much more indicative of reading difficulty than that "originality index" he came up with.
Why didn't the author try the most obvious test of reading difficulty of all: Flesch-Kincaid? [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#5I think the author should have filtered out stopwords. The big "The" in the middle of the visualization seems kind of obvious. It would be much more interesting to see the words that make this text different from other english texts.
I did some work while still in college doing analysis of texts from Project Gutenberg. Removing the stop words made the analysis far more interesting.
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#6Why does everyone find the Silmarillion hard to read? Am I the only one, who had no problems with that style?
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#7Why does everyone find the Silmarillion hard to read? Am I the only one, who had no problems with that style?
I was thinking the same. I never had problems with Silmarillion. Couldn't read Messages from Middle Earth however, that was just not enough connection. But Silmarillion, man, that's an epic collection of stories. I think it might be a cool material for a TV series. Say, one season for every major story with the same characters, plus some creative freedom for the screenwriters of course.
Just think about it - battles with hordes of orks, hero elves AND 30 or so Balrogs. And loosing / winning a battle doesn't just blow up a tower, it creates spasms in damn middle earth. The ring wars got nothing on that..
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#8Why does everyone find the Silmarillion hard to read? Am I the only one, who had no problems with that style?
I suspect that the author may have had more luck explaining the difficulty of the Silmarillion if he had compared the number of unique proper nouns. I enjoyed it, but ISTR when I read it (over 30 years ago now) that it did have the feel of a telephone directory.
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#9I do research in this topic. While word level features are readily available and provide some interesting insights, I'm more interested in syntactic phenomena (e.g., recurring phrases). But in the case of The Simarillion the "reading difficulty" could be beyond even that; I suspect it might be because it doesn't build up suspense the way the traditional narrative of a novel does. Unfortunately, that might be hard to capture in a programmable test.
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#10Where's the sentence length statistics? Average word length? Commas per sentence? All are surely much more indicative of reading difficulty than that "originality index" he came up with. Why didn't the author try the most obvious test of reading difficulty of all: Flesch-Kincaid? [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...
Hi, author here.
First, it's she, not he.
Second, because I hadn't heard about that obvious test at all back then. I never pretended to do a superserious scientific analysis but rather answer to the questions that came to my mind, by using a computer to validate hypothesis.
But many thanks for the pointers & suggestions, though! I was thinking about rebuilding this to make it realtime+interactive so that more than one text could be analysed/visualised, so I'll make sure to introduce the new tests.