Digital Humanities
Franco Moretti
V.
• “Abstract Models for literary History…” (8).
In correspondence with the Digital Humanities effort, Franco Moretti in his book, in the title chaptered
“Graphs”, describes how the humanities departments should be supplanting detailed “close reading” with
an abstract “distant reading”. As opposed to focusing on the minute and subjective, abstraction aims to
recognize certain literary patterns throughout history, genres, places, etc.
Interpretation V Data
• “Quantitative research provides a type of data which is ideally
independent of interpretations” (9).
The goal is to shift away from the close analyzing of specific words and instead focus on the
larger patterns that can be found. This is done with the aid of digital tools, by comparing and
contrasting certain elements of a text. For example: most frequent words can be compared and
contrast, the differences found in texts spanning times can be surmised, indications of genres
can be taken from details unaccounted for by the naked human eye, such as the pattern of
punctuations. This allows the reader to gather objective data, rather than relying on the
subjective interpretation of some English professor somewhere.
Genres Determined by Time Period
• “Morphological Genres that last in time, but always only for some
time”(14).
Genres or themes are largely dependent on the time period they occur in. Certain
themes or genres become more and less popular as time goes on.
Certain Themes Prevail…
• “As long as a hegemonic form has not lost its ‘artistic usefulness’,
there is not much that a rival form can do” (17).
A form of writing can remain in place for quite some time, as long as there remains a
relevance for that topic.
Moretti’s Concepts Applied to Text
• THE GENRE/THEME OF EVIL AS COMPARED THROUGH EVOLVING TIME
PERIODS. HOW HAS IT PROGRESSED AND CHANGED? IS IT THE SAME THEME
THAT IS STILL RELAVANT, OR AN EVOLVED THEME THAT IS ENTIRELY
DIFFERENT?
Corpus of Grimm Tales and Disney Tales
• Rather than reading each individual text which would take too much
time, we collect a corpus of Grimm Brothers’ tales and Disney
screenplays. We abstract the texts, by feeding them into the
computer and noting their similarities and differences.
Grimm Brothers
The Frog King, or Iron Henry
Our Lady's Child
The Story of a Youth Who Went
Forth to Learn What Fear Was
The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids
Faithful John
The Good Bargain
The Twelve Brothers
Brother and Sister
Rapunzel
The Three Little Men in the Wood
The Three Spinners
Hansel and Grethel
Disney Fairytales
Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
The Reluctant Dragon
Dumbo
Bambi
Cinderella
Sleeping Beauty
Princess and the Frog
Make Mine Music
Song of the South
Fun and Fancy Free
Collection of Data
• We hope to compare and contrast the Brothers Grimm's Stories and the Disney Fairytales that
were based on them.
• After collect our data, we will create “maps” and “graphs” that illustrate the progression,
evolution, and changes of these stories over time.
• We will focus on a key theme…
Time Determined Genre=
• In our project, the genre/theme of evil is the one we are choosing to
focus on. We hope to determine:
• Is it an ever-relevant theme that is just still continued from the Grimm
time period?
• Has it totally changed, and now represents something entirely
different that is characterized by our time period?
• If it has changed, how? And what does this reflect?
Evil Theme’s “Artistic Usefulness”
• Because we have recreated the Grimm Brother’s Fairytales, they
seem to still be artistically useful and relevant.
• Yet, the Disney version is quite and seems to portray evil in a much
different way.
• How? Why?
Digital Considerations to Answer these
Questions
• Voyant- Can be used to collocate words associated with the evil
characters in the Disney movies V. Grimm.
• MFW- can objectively gather the prevalence of evil throughout the
stories.
• Textarc- can show the frequency of evil throughout the stories.
• LDA can collect the patterns of associated words with key topics.
• Correspondence analysis- can analyze the differences
• Etc…
Conclusion
• Moretti's concepts of abstracting literature will be applied by
collecting a corpus of Grimm Brother's fairytale's and comparing
them to more current and prettied up versions of Disney’s fairy tales.
The idea of genre and theme will be analyzed by comparing and
contrasting the differences between the two corpuses. A
determination will be made regarding the relevance of evil as a
theme, after we have collected enough data to recognize the
progression or lack of, between the two.