{"id":30,"date":"2023-02-15T17:57:30","date_gmt":"2023-02-15T17:57:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/midterm.keanel.sites.carleton.edu\/mideterm\/?page_id=30"},"modified":"2023-02-19T23:47:09","modified_gmt":"2023-02-19T23:47:09","slug":"text-analysis-of-the-kingkiller-chronicles","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/midterm.keanel.sites.carleton.edu\/mideterm\/","title":{"rendered":"Textual Analysis of ‘The Kingkiller Chronicles’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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“The Wise Man’s Fear<\/em> was worth the wait. I gulped it down in a day, staying up almost to dawn reading, and I am already itching for the next one. He’s bloody good, this Rothfuss guy.”<\/strong><\/p>George R. R. Martin<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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What is this project?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Name of the Wind<\/em> and The Wise Man’s Fear<\/em>, written by Patrick Rothfuss, are the two novels making up the Kingkiller Chronicle<\/em>s. If you are a fan of excellent storytelling and high fantasy, these are the books for you. However, fans have been waiting since 2011 for the third and (allegedly) final book to complete the series. I was between this series and Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive<\/em>; however, that would be a four thousand page dataset, so I settled for the more manageable series. My dataset is two large text files for each one of Rothfuss’s novels.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Name of the Wind visualization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Wise Man’s Fear visualization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The process<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Beginning the project, the text files were in need of a fair bit of cleaning. Perhaps it was the legitimacy of the files themselves, but there were non-ASCII characters, a foreword, and excerpts from the author which needed to be pruned so they would not skew the data (albeit only slightly). The natural next step was to input the cleaned text files into Voyant to perform text analysis. I had to mess around with the software for a while before I realized what I wanted to visualize with my data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly to the ‘Network of Thrones’ project, I focused on characters. However, instead of strength of character connection, I focused on the relative frequency of their names. Through this analysis, we can visually trace story lines and relationships as they develop around Kvothe (pronounced K-Vo-th), the protagonist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The analysis<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

For context, the majority of the novel takes place in the past, as the present day protagonist is relating his life’s story to a scribe (the Chronicler). Kvothe currently uses the pseudonym “Kote,” so we can see the dominant frequencies of “Chronicler” and “Kote” at the beginning of The Name of the Wind<\/em>. We can also point out the novel’s various interludes\u2014where Kvothe pauses his retelling in the present\u2014because there is a visible bump in Kote and Chronicler’s frequency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking at The Wise Man’s Fear<\/em>, we can identify other prominent characters are introduced, their signifigance in the story, and when they pass out of focus. For instance, Denna frequently disappears and reappears at random. In both novels, you can see her frequency wax and wane when she deigns to appear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In The Wise Man’s Fear<\/em>, Kvothe embarks upon a harrowing adventure with several companions, including Tempi. There is a stretch of time where Tempi dominates the page, but Felurian interupts for a period before Kvothe then reunites with Tempi.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Presentation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The two graphs I chose to represent my dataset represent each of Patrick Rothfuss’s two books, and each are clearly labeled. I embedded them as jpegs because I found embedding them with html allowed a user to remove data. Finally, I chose to stick with with static images of the graphs and legend. Thankfully, Voyant classified each of the characters with different colors to differentiate character, making it more visually approachable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I divided the website into different sections so their respective purpose and content were clear to the reader. I also chose for the visualizations to appear after the introduction, so the reader can develop their idea of the project before considering the graphs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Significance<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The primary function of this project is to provide a more holistic view of a piece of work. Through textual analysis of novels using story dependent keywords (most likely its characters), we are able to track the flow of the novel. From the viewpoint of an author, this kind of textual analysis could be helpful from a storytelling perspective. I may be able to tell if one character dominates the story too much, or vise versa. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms of the Digital Humanities as a whole, projects like these contribute by changing our perception of certain pieces of media and literature. With powerful software like Voyant, this kind of perspective becomes possible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The Wise Man’s Fear was worth the wait. I gulped it down in a day, staying up almost to dawn reading, and I am already itching for the next one. He’s bloody good, this Rothfuss guy.” George R. R. Martin What is this project? The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, written […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-30","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/midterm.keanel.sites.carleton.edu\/mideterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/midterm.keanel.sites.carleton.edu\/mideterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/midterm.keanel.sites.carleton.edu\/mideterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midterm.keanel.sites.carleton.edu\/mideterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midterm.keanel.sites.carleton.edu\/mideterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/midterm.keanel.sites.carleton.edu\/mideterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70,"href":"https:\/\/midterm.keanel.sites.carleton.edu\/mideterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30\/revisions\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/midterm.keanel.sites.carleton.edu\/mideterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}