Distant Reading

I decided to do this assignment with the book 'The Circular Staircase' By Mary Robert Rinehart. I hadn't heard of this novel before so I wasn't sure where to go with my predictions. 

Prediction : 

I am guessing, with this being a detective novel, there is a case to be solved and that we as readers will be clued in on answers before the subject of the novel or perhaps we will learn the answers along with the subject. I also am assuming that said mystery takes place on a circular staircase, or around the staircase. However, perhaps the plot of the story is a never-ending “loop” that seems to spiral down, creating a domino effect of some sort, and there is no actual staircase.

Moving from this I went straight into using Voyant Tools to look at the sections of the novel piece by piece. I started with Chapter One 'I Take a Country House'.

The most frequently used words in Chapter 1 of The Circular Staircase are not words I expected. House, Liddy, Halsey, said, and right. These seem like they would be pretty common words in a novel, perhaps not Liddy and Halsey specifically, but those are words that are individual to this particular novel.

I did this a couple times with Chapters two and three. I then had a thought of what if I put my whole novel in the Voyant Tools text box? What are the most frequent words used? What would the word web look like?

I understand that this doesn't give a comprehensive look at the actual plot and story of the novel but it gives an interesting insight into the basic structure of the novel and how Rinehart constructed the story. With the word 'said'is the most frequently used, you would think this would be a very dialogue-heavy novel, but if you look closer you realize that while said is the most used word it is a mere 483 words out of 70,000+. That's not to say that Rinehart may not use other words to cue dialogue, but just off of this glance it looks like the novel is more controlled by the actions and setting rather than dialogue. Other most frequent words tell us that its very setting lead - room and house are in the group of five of the most common words. This leads me to believe that the whole story may take place in or around one room, or house.

I wanted to look further and see if my suspicion about the novel taking place prominently in one house, was true. I decided to use the bubbleline feature and see just where in the novel the word 'room' or 'house' was used. As seen from the screenshot, they are used all through the novel, giving some weight to my suspicions, but I wouldn't know for sure unless I read the novel word for word.

Overall my experience with this novel, reading at a distance, and Voyant Tools has been one of exceptional insight. I wasn't aware of this type of 'reading' before this week and had always been upset at the knowledge that I would never be able to read all the novels and stories in the world, that I would miss out on thousands of stories and they would never have an impact on my life. Voyant Tools also had given me ideas of different ways to conduct novel studies. I wish this had been a tool I had know about when I was in high school. I would have used this to enhance projects and perhaps even papers.

Works Cited:
Rinehart, Mary R. The Circular Staircase. Project Gutenberg, 2008.