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Visualizing Tolkien

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Re: Visualizing Tolkien

#11

Post by qznc »

DeepDuh wrote: post #7
qznc wrote: post #6

Why 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…

Agreed. Compared to the Silmarillion the Lord of the Ring war seems kind of cute. Imagine a thousand balrogs riding on dragons against the elven city Gondolin.

Re: Visualizing Tolkien

#12

Post by wizard_2 »

The painstaking lengths people go though in honor of Tolkien is amazing. Along those lines I think http://3rin.gs/ deserves a mention, especially as maps are a "visualization" of sorts. I met the author this summer. The attention to detail is staggering.

Re: Visualizing Tolkien

#14

Post by Steuard »

qznc wrote: post #6

Why does everyone find the Silmarillion hard to read? Am I the only one, who had no problems with that style?

I've heard many people say that it "reads like the Bible", or like a history book: there aren't any "viewpoint characters", or really any recurring characters at all (especially if inscrutable angelic beings don't count). Certainly if you're expecting another story in the style of The Lord of the Rings, you'll be disappointed.

Personally, I loved the book, but I was hungry for all the "lore" about Middle-earth and its history that I could find. I think most people would really prefer a self-contained story.

Oh, and for the record, an underlying reason for many people disliking The Silmarillion may be that Tolkien never really finished it. I have a little bit of a writeup of the story behind that on my Tolkien FAQ site: http://tolkien.slimy.com/faq/External.html#SilmChanges

Re: Visualizing Tolkien

#15

Post by jmilloy »

>One of the reviewers argued that it was the hardest book to read because 'and' was the most used word in the book.

I think the author took this way to literally. Granted, it inspired some fun (albeit odd and basic) data analysis. But the point of the reviewer isn't about word counts but about style and pace. That, narratively, the Silmarillion just felt like it continued on and on without clear sections of rising and falling action or significant breaks. Sentences were long and atmospheric, rather than short, quick and active.

Re: Visualizing Tolkien

#16

Post by bane »

Great post, I love the thinking out loud thought process portions.

Some suggestions: try removing stopwords (the, and, etc.), it'll bring out more variation on the analysis. Particularly in the circular graphs.

Try unique n-gram analysis, I suspect that will show something interesting. At the very least 2-gram (bigram/digram) analysis might show something cool.

Some other interesting comparative measures, since the author already has all of the tokens, try the Jaccard index between book pairs to look for similarity. (may even want to break the books down into major sections: e.g. LOTR can be viewed as both 3 and 6 books.

Some others to try, sentence length, word length, distribution of tf-idf scores, etc. etc.

fun fun!

Re: Visualizing Tolkien

#17

Post by jmilloy »

sole wrote: post #10
scrumper wrote: post #4

Where'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 on…

Have fun with it! This seems like a great example to encourage further analysis because you still don't have a testable quantitative hypothesis for why it was harder to read. Makes me want to start coming up with metrics, too! Of course there's a big list of readability metrics, but it's way more fun to discover them on (y)our own. That said, I too was a little surprised when you had a heading titled "The classic graphs" without actually having perspective in the field for what would be classic.

Re: Visualizing Tolkien

#18

Post by aw3c2 »

I almost closed the tab right away because the text only started below my fold. The 4 graphics fit the screen perfectly so I assumed that was all. Make sure you scroll!

Re: Visualizing Tolkien

#19

Post by rthomas6 »

qznc wrote: post #6

Why does everyone find the Silmarillion hard to read? Am I the only one, who had no problems with that style?

It reads like a history book to me, or a collection of legends, rather than a traditional story arc. I enjoyed the Silmarillion, but more like one would enjoy reading about the rise and fall of the Roman empire than reading fiction. It was more of a learning experience. It also made LOTR a lot richer when I went back and read it again.
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