Daniel Lugo
Introduction:
For my midterm project, I used digital text analysis tools to examine the themes, locations, and patterns in the book Life and Adventures of Frank and Jesse James by J. A. Dacus. My goal is to explore how text analysis can uncover insights that may not be obvious through reading the book.
By using Voyant tools, I analyzed word frequency, trends, and relationships within the text to better understand how the brothers were portrayed and where they mostly dominated. This digital approach helped me visualise these patterns through graphs and mappings.
Sources:
The original book pdf for this project was the full text of Life and Adventures of Frank and Jesse James, from Project Gutenberg. The text retells the story of the brothers, but also has a lot of information outside of this, such as credentials, licensing, copyright, and release dates. Before importing the text into Voyant Tools, I cleaned the text to ensure this separate information wouldn’t interfere with the word analysis. After stripping the file, i saved it to a file and uploaded it directly into Voyant. This ensured a consistent narrative of the content rather than any extraneous text.
Processes
Voyant Tools is a web-based text analysis platform designed for the digital humanities and related research. Once you have ulpoaded a dataset of words (usually pdf’s of books, magazines, or journals) it generates a set of graphs for you. These include word frequency in the form of a cloud, trend visualizations through bar graphs, and individual relationships between 2-5 wors at a time. After looking through all of the features available to me through Voyant I was intruiged by the amount of times citys and states were mentioned. This would allow me to map out a visualization of where the brothers had been, or plotted the most without reading the entire book. Here is the embeded map:
Through this map I was able to learn that the brothers had spent a lot of time in Kansas City and Saint Louis, and closer to the end of their journey Northfield was mentioned more. I did some research of my own and found out that Frank and Jesse spent a lot of time in Kansas City because they were from Missouri and they had deep ties with Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War. The reason why they were in Saint Louis a lot as well, besides having large connections in Missouri as a whole, were because of hiding spots like the Meramec Caverns. Although not as common for the brothers Northfield was also a point of interest. Frank and Jesse were informed of a big deposit in the National Bank of the town, resulting in their attack.
Presentation
To present my findings, I created a new subdomain for my midterm project and built a webpage to display both the written analysis and embedded visualizations. I embedded the Voyant Tools outputs directly into the site so that viewers can interact with the data themselves rather than only reading about the results.
When designing the site, I prioritized clarity and visual simplicity. The layout is structured using headings and concise paragraphs to guide the reader through the project. The visualizations are placed near relevant explanations to make the written data easier to interpret. This approach allows users unfamiliar with the digital humanities and its tools to still understand the significance of the findings while encouraging engagement.
Significance
My project demonstrates how digital tools can offer new perspectives on historical and literary texts. By using Voyant Tools to analyze Life and Adventures of Frank and Jesse James, I was able to identify language patterns and thematic trends that would be difficult to pick up on through reading alone. The frequency and contextual usage of certain words highlight how the narrative constructs ideas about the brothers.
Applying data analysis to books allows scholars to examine large-scale patterns, but it also has limitations. Word frequency alone cannot fully capture tone or irony. However, when combined with close reading, digital tools can enhance understanding. In the context of Digital Art and Humanities, this project illustrates how technology can expand the traditional humanities by providing new ways to explore, visualize, and interpret cultural texts.