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Qixuan Hou
Dr. Sarah Higinbotham
ENGL1102
Nov. 09. 2014
Technology Reshapes the Understanding of Literature
Good readers are often defined as those who read books word by word, line by line,
trying to understand an unknown writer or his background, and industrious readers are those who
devote all their time to reading useful resources. However, with the rapid development of
technology, the tremendous amount of great accessible works can easily overwhelm both good
and industrious readers. It seems impossible for them to read all available resources in order to
fully understand literary works. Therefore, data mining is being applied to large literary data sets
with the help of computers in a search for greater understanding (Rohrer, Sibert, and Ebert 122).
Data mining is an analytical strategy to discover information embedded in databases. Two
steps, data processing and data visualization, are involved in the analyzing process (Rohrer,
Sibert, and Ebert 129). First, taking advantage of the fast processing speeds of computers to read
large amounts of data in a few seconds, which is impossible for human beings, special software
gathers information which users want from sources. Many available functions, such word cloud,
word tree and word bubble, allow users to evaluate their sources differently. Second, appropriate
diagrams are created to visualize the useful information which is gathered in the first step. There
are a lot of visual data structures, each of which has special characteristics available to describe
diverse information (Cormode, Muthukrishnan 1). For example, graphs, such as pie diagrams,
bar diagrams, and histogram, are

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commonly used to show statistical analysis results; maps are always used to visualize
information relating to geography; trees are good at showing the hierarchy of an organization or
a revolution (Moretti 2). However, no matter which way the information is displayed, the main
goal of data visualization is to make information easily understandable for human beings. Thus,
data mining is the strategy to intentionally select information from large quantities of data and
present it in an organized and often an artistic way (Simoff, Bhlen, Mazeika 1).
The digital age has already reshaped literary studies. Electronic devices have begun to
replace printed versions, and the traditional way of reading is changing as well. The innovative
reading style, distant reading, was declared by Franco Moretti in his book, Graphs, Maps,
Trees. He mentioned that distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge:
fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection (Moretti 1). Data mining,
the way to achieve the goal of distant reading, abstracts available sources by filtering in order
to display the hidden models, and then diagrams the overall interconnections (Rohrer, Sibert, and
Ebert 124). Data mining also presents a novel reading method to fulfill the need of the large
aggregation and the scale of research. As large collections are built, based on the exponentially
growing number of texts, text visualization provides superior ways for humans to analyze and
understand large document sets (Simoff, Bhlen, Mazeika 331). Instead of the traditional
research for the individually meaningful text, scholars are able to analyze a great deal of sources
in order to show the interconnections as well.
As a science student learning Shakespeare in non-native language, I always felt frustrated
and confused while reading the plays. I was driven crazy by metaphors in the plays, which are

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continuously, however, praised by experts in English. Instead of beauty of the languages, I was
overwhelmed by minutiae. I realized there must be a potential model which experts follow or
even unconsciously follow to understand metaphors in Shakespeares plays. The most useful way
to find the model is to analyze the large amounts of sources; data mining is the best method
available to sort the sources and then generate the abstract model which can be applied to future
understanding of metaphors in Shakespeares plays. The transformation from texts to models, the
great step in literature understanding, uncovers the objective foundations, which are hidden in
literatures intricate perceptual cognition (Rohrer, Sibert, and Ebert 124). Based on the statistical
methods and the technology, the straightforward models explain the latent facts in literary works
that have been considered as the special intuition of literature scholars. It is data mining, which,
connecting science and literature, presents overall content similarities and differences in a neat
structure with clearly labeled signs.
William Shakespeares plays take the lead in this technical movement in liberal arts, even
though there are still some academics and researchers feeling uncomfortable using data mining
to analyze literature. At the Folger Shakespeare Library, library director, Michael Witmore,
presented his great work, Data-mining Shakespeare. By using DocuScope, a linguistic analysis
tool geared toward literature, Witmore processed seven hundreds different thousand-word
excerpts of plays from the First Folio. He, cooperating with Jonathan Hope, reported unusual
discoveries by the distant reading.
One significant discovery is a very clear linguistic distinction between Shakespeares
Comedies and the Histories (Hope and Witmore 8). The figure, plotted by DocuScope, showed
the results of cumulative proportion of variation from Shakespeares plays of the First Folio,

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consisting of a thousand words. The precious statistics presented the consistent results, by which
people can be easily convinced. Even though we can conveniently count whatever we want by
machines, the hardest task is to find out what can be meaningful to be counted. Digitally based
research does not offer us the impossible dream of objective humanities research, but it does
offer us the possibility of applying subjective humanities based insights in a consistent ways to
test their applicability and utility arose a large number of instances (Hope and Witmore 10). The
technology is only the tool which can help scholars easily and conveniently gather useful
information, while it is still the scholars who define what the useful information is. Therefore,
human beings control the spirit of the technology-based literature research.
However, data mining is also a tool to help aspiring scholars with the new perspectives of
the literary works to begin their researches (Cormode, Muthukrishnan 8). As a student, I started
my distance reading of the play Twelfth Night, using data mining in order to get rid of specific
sentences, words and even letters. At the beginning, I made a word cloud of the play Twelfth
Night, showing me the most frequent words in the play were let, see, and give, which were
all verbs. The visual attracted my attention to the verbs in Twelfth Night when I read the play line
by line. Thanks to the intentional focus on verbs while reading the play, I experienced the beauty
of Shakespeares verbs in one sentence after another. It is distant reading that did help me find
the point, the usage of verbs, to pay more attention during close reading. Furthermore, the
visualizations of the data deriving from texts sometimes come out be the informative art works
as well. Literature uses words and sentences to help readers imagine the views in their minds.
However, graphs, maps, and trees, with color labeled on the top, turn out to be the aesthetically
beautiful type of art works which convey information in a way more straight forward.

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Computers expose us to a tremendous amount of data in daily life. And, no one dares to
imagine life with millions of information needed to be processed without help of advanced
technology. Consequently, there are and will be more applications, such as Google Books, which
take advantage of technology to sort the available resources neatly, and also make exponentially
growing numbers of resources accessible by more and more people. Another application of
advanced technology, data mining, also possesses its own magic power to overcome scholars in
diverse fields. In the age of big data, data mining, a consequence of technology development,
satisfies peoples desire for innovation of the way to think and learn. Literature is being and will
continue to be reshaped by technology. Experts implement technical tools to analyze literature
from new perspectives, and scholars regard the tools as helpful hands to simplify their work in
many ways.

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Works Cited
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso,
2005. Print.
Simoff, Simeon J., Michael H. Bhlen, and Arturas Mazeika. Visual Data Mining: Theory,
Techniques and Tools for Visual Analytics. Berlin: Springer, 2008. Print.
Cormode, Graham, and S. Muthukrishnan. Summarizing and Mining Skewed Data Streams
Proceedings of the 2005 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (2005): 44-55.
Google Scholar. Web. 11. Nov. 2014.
Randall M. Rohrer, John L. Sibert, and David S. Ebert. "The Shape of Shakespeare: Visualizing
Text using Implicit Surfaces" IEEE_INFOVIS, 1998, IEEE Symposium on, Information
Visualization, IEEE Symposium (1998): 122. Information Visualization. Web. 11. Nov. 2014.
Hope, Jonathan, and Michael Witmore. The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of Green Sleeves:
Digital Approaches to Shakespeares Language of Genre Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3
(2010): 357-390. Google Scholar. Web. 11. Nov. 2014.

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