Here we find yet another personification of air, which enwraps the story with subtle layers of movement and circulation. We could trace this pattern, and its effects on narrative time and narrative progress, through concordances and dispersion plots of "air" and any wind-related words.

Dubliners's incorporation of song fragments and musical allusions deserves closer attention, especially in stories such as "Eveline" and "The Boarding House." Before performing close readings on the language of these songs, and the effects and implications of such language, we could treat every song lyric in Dubliners as a document and identify the most distinctive words of every song with TF/IDF analysis.

The windows allow a "fresh breeze" to enter Mrs. Mooney's house, opening up a circulatory channel between the house's interior and the summery world that surrounds it. A concordance and dispersion plot of the word "window" would allow us to trace the figure of the window across all of the stories. After all, the window paradoxically enables characters like Eveline to behold the outside world--and all of the openings and escapes that the view suggests--but blocks immediate access to wider horizons.

This is the first instance in Dubliners of a narrator introducing characters by name and in sequence. To begin to tackle the question of why only certain characters are named throughout the text, we could perform a stylometric analysis on the stories; looking at the generated graph in Jupyter, we might then identify a cluster of stories that involves more overt character descriptions.

These sentences capture the story's thematic core: the internal and external dynamics of coming and going, not only spatially (e.g., the passing pedestrians) and geographically (e.g., the priest in Melbourne), but also generationally (see the double repetition of "grown up" in this paragraph) and in the transition from life to death. We could begin to trace the workings of this theme in this story, and throughout Dubliners, by comparing the frequency of language of stasis and return to the frequency of words associated with leaving and escape.

This first sentence already raises some questions. What does it mean for North Richmond Street to be "blind" (sightless?)? And why is the Christian Brothers' School characterized as a prison from which boys are "set free"? We could explore the second question further by creating concordances and collocations with words associated with freedom and captivity.

The narrator's description of the commercial ships, and his fantasy of sailing away from Dublin, briefly suspend the narrative, creating a temporal and spatial expansiveness that pressures the story's geographic containment. It would be interesting to track and investigate the language of imagination and fantasy throughout Dubliners with a concordance and collocations.

Packed with mixed feelings of curiosity, fear, deferral, confusion, irritation, freedom, and reminiscing, this passage suggests that the narrator's relationship with the late Father Flynn is far more complicated (and perhaps troubling) than meets the eye. The language of this excerpt is ripe for close reading, but we could also explore it computationally by calculating pronoun frequencies (i.e., how often "he" and "him" appear compared to "I" and "me"), and by performing a sentiment analysis in a Jupyter notebook. It would be interesting to compare one's close readings with the results of a computer-generated sentiment analysis.

I'm curious about what we would find by tracking the word "too" across the entire Mansfield short story corpus, mainly with word counts, word collocations, and n-grams. My hypothesis would be that the word "too" appears most frequently (perhaps exclusively) in stories with thematics of excess, both material and immaterial.

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.

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.

This interlude slows the narrative down with sensory details that evoke unease and gloom: from the icy air, to the skeleton-like trees, to the clustered houses, to the trudging passengers, the reader cannot help but anxiously anticipate the events and conversations that will follow. We can broaden our exploration of how the story creates this mood by tracing the words "cold," "pale," and "dark" with word counts, concordances, and dispersion plots.

This word occurs five times in this story, both as a verb (i.e., to become pale, or to appear less important and remarkable in comparison to something else) and as a drab color. Along with a concordance, a dispersion plot with "pale" and the more vibrant colors that populate the story would illuminate the visual, textural, and perhaps symbolic significance of paleness.

The motif of facial flushing/blushing would be interesting to trace with a concordance and dispersion plots. What are the material, affective, and characterological causes and significances of blushing in this story? Put more simply, when and why do women blush?

The recurrence of "meringues" until this point warrants further examination. In addition to tracing this motif and performing contextual analyses, we can use word collocations and concordances to better understand the physical and figurative resonances of this dessert. This reading could then feed into a broader analysis of all of the story's ingestible substances.

Throughout the story, the narrator references specific parts of articles of clothing (e.g., "collar," "sleeve," etc.). We could use concordances and dispersion plots to trace this clothing motif and begin to investigate its material and affective significances.

This is one of a handful of examples of "free indirect discourse" or "free indirect style": the impersonal, third-person narrator conveys Laura's thoughts without markers such as "Laura thought" or "Laura said." This narrative mode enables the text to seamlessly move in and out of characters' subjectivities. Would it be possible to write a program to identify instances of free indirect discourse?

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.

This is the thirtieth and final time that the word "justice" appears in The Moonstone. What does "justice" mean in this text? In what ways does the novel's conclusion do (or fail to do) "justice" to the narrative buildup? What do different characters mean when they mention "justice"? What would a concordance and dispersion plot illuminate about the linguistic and conceptual workings of "justice" throughout The Moonstone?

With this key phrase of legal discourse, Cuff's takes on the role of a prosecutor in a courtroom, shouldering the burden of proof in the case at hand. What is the relationship between detective work and legal argumentation? How does the novel's language put various characters on trial, not only before other characters, but also before the novel's jury of readers? A word collocation analysis of words and phrases with legal significance would help us to determine whether or not legal language shapes standards of evidence in The Moonstone.

Ezra Jennings is very conscious about what he can and cannot disclose to other characters (and, consequently, to readers of the text). When and why do characters withhold information throughouth The Moonstone? And how does delayed information shape the pacing of the narrative? A comparative word count of chapters and larger sections that involve deferred information can help us to determine whether the act of withholding knowledge extends or curtails narration.

Once again, we encounter the language of detective work, which often involves the uncovering and probing of underlying motives. What distinguishes Betteredge's "detective fever" from Ezra Jennings's understanding of detection? We could operationalize this comparative question into a word collocation study of target words that are associated with detective work (e.g., "detective," "suspect," "motive," etc.).

The repetition of the word "facts" in this conversation reanimates the tension between absolute knowledge and shifting suspicions. As an epistolary novel, does The Moonstone present any "facts"? Or is every (alleged) "fact" refracted by memory, sentiment, and linguistic representation? What is the status of evidence (i.e., the stained nightgown) in this scene?

Although the novel has already suggested that Betteredge is an unreliable narrator, Franklin Blake's explicit refutation of specific points in the First Period account corroborates the faultiness of Betteredge's perspective. Whom should we trust? Maybe a comparative sentiment analysis of Betteredge and Blake's accounts would allow us to test Blake's claim that Betteredge has "overdrawn" his narrative and interpreted passing references too "seriously."

The language that Bruff uses to preface the case at hand--"to speak more correctly, on the subject of the Indian plot to steal the Diamond"--betrays his preconceived conclusion. Once again, the tension between knowledge and suspicion comes to mind.

Mathew Bruff carefully anticipates the reader's objections, and tries to persuade him ("my dear sir") to reconsider his assessment of Godfrey Ablewhite. To better understand how and why The Moonstone's various narrators directly address readers, we could run a word collocation analysis and/or a sentiment analysis on each moment that features a narrator addressing a reader. Then, we would be informed enough to speculate about the extent to which such addresses prove effective.

As we evaluate the many forms of "evidence" that the novel presents, we should ask ourselves how important or meaningful eyewitness accounts are in relation to testimonies, object clues, hearsay, and characters' inferences. An evidence network would allow us to visualize how information interacts and spreads, and modify our epistemological questions and detective work accordingly.

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.

Once again, Betteredge annotates his own thoughts with plenty of parenthetical remarks and value judgments. Coupled with a word frequency analysis of parenthetical statements throughout the novel, a word collocation analysis of moments such as this would reveal semantic and conceptual patterns about the words that tend to surround Betteredge's parentheticals.

Regardless of whether the reader sides with Betteredge or Sergeant Cuff in their assessment of Miss Rachel, "infamous suspicion" is the driving affect of this moment. What would a word collocation analysis of the words "suspect," "suspicious," and "suspicion" reveal about when and how the novel fuels and thwarts the suspicions of characters and readers?

This is a curious way of describing the impulse to decipher and investigate as a detective. What would be revealed by a sentiment analysis of the language that characters use to describe the temperament, feelings, and skills associated with detection and detective-ness?

The "tin case" illustrates how, in the genre of detective fiction, the detective figure constructs answers to the "mystery" at hand not only by asking questions about suspicious behavior, but also by collecting information from object clues. Perhaps a word collocation analysis of scenes with suspicious behavior and/or object clues can shed light on the kinds of words that tend to appear when the text presents important pieces of evidence (or, alternatively, red herrings).

The novel's abundance of dialogue warrants questions about how one should evaluate the significance of any given conversation (e.g., the chatter that populates this scene). Perhaps a study of word frequencies, coupled with part-of-speech tagging, can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the words that distinguish informative conversations from less important chatter in detective fiction.

In this moment of self-referentiality, the text relies on intensely physical language ("detain you," "put down," "jog on a little while longer") to demand sustained attention towards the facts of the case. Betteredge's physicalized language draws attention to the demanding nature of focused close reading.

Three questions/issues arise. To what extent can readers "suspend their decision" as they consider the narrator's account? Of what value is the narrator's "word of honour"? What is meant by "the truth," and how do the words "strictly" and "literally" modify it?