4 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2018
    1. Why didn’t the men begin? What were they waiting for? There they stood, smoothing their gloves, patting their glossy hair and smiling among themselves. Then, quite suddenly, as if they had only just made up their minds that that was what they had to do, the men came gliding over the parquet. There was a joyful flutter among the girls.

      Throughout the story, the narrator figures the men and women as birds participating in courtship/pre-mating dances. Observe the narrator's ornithological language here: the men "glid[e] over the parquet" towards the women, who respond with "a joyful flutter." With part-of-speech tagging, we could zoom in on how the story's syntactical elements (especially verbs and adjectives) create this parallel between social and animal rituals.

    2. And now the landing-stage came out to meet them. Slowly it swam towards the Picton boat,

      This excerpt personifies the "landing-stage" with the verbs "came" and "swam." Where else does this occur in this story? And what does this device imply about the "voyage" that the story recounts? Part-of-speech tagging would allow us to examine when, how, and to what effect(s) objects becoming (grammatical) subjects through personification.

    3. And after all the weather was ideal.

      The story begins with the additive conjunction "and," which already suggests accumulation (and perhaps even festive excess) on a syntactical level. Some part-of-speech tagging and n-grams would allow us to see how often the speaker uses additive conjunctions, and to what effects.

  2. course-computational-literary-analysis.netlify.com course-computational-literary-analysis.netlify.com
    1. My diary informs me

      This is an interesting reversal of typical subject-object relations. The diary, which is an object, is grammatically positioned as an informative agent, while Miss Clack, a person, becomes an object that is acted upon. Some part-of-speech tagging in scenes that feature document evidence would help us to better understand when and why this happens, and why it might be significant.