The Art of Literary Text Analysis with Spyral Notebooks

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The Art of Literary Text Analysis with Spyral Notebooks has two objectives. First, it's designed as a guide to provide a gentle introduction to concepts and methodologies for literary text analysis with computers – it's meant to be very welcoming to newcomers to digital tools for the study of texts. Second, the guide is intended to offer a glimpse of the wide range of possible techniques for using tools to study texts – if it cannot hope to explain and demonstrate everything, it at least has the ambition of suggesting the breadth of possibilities and providing a helpful foundation for further exploration and experimentation.

This instance of The Art of Literary Text Analysis is created in Spyral Notebooks (there's also companion version in iPython Notebooks). Other choices are available, and many conceptual aspects of the guide are relevant regardless of the implementation. Spyral Notebooks was chosen for several reasons:

  1. Spyral Notebooks requires no setup or installation to get started, you just visit a web page;
  2. Spyral Notebooks leverages the analytic and visualization capabilities of Voyant Tools;
  3. Text blocks in Spyral Notebooks are written with a simple styled editor (we're big fans of Markdown but we don't want to force people to learn it);
  4. Code in Spyral Notebooks is essentially written in Javascript, a relatively friendly language to learn and one that's widely used;
  5. The native format for Spyral Notebooks is HTML so you can usually open and read a notebook even if you're not doing so within the Spyral application;
  6. Spyral Notebooks offers a literate programming model of writing where blocks of prose text (like this one) can be interspersed with bits of code and output (like below). The Art of Literary Text Analysis focuses on process, and the documentation-rich format offered by Spiral Notebooks is well-suited to the nature of this guide.

Below is a very simple example of a Spyral code block. We use the loadCorpus function to load the built-in Jane Austen corpus of novels and then we call the tool function to create a Cirrus wordcloud from the corpus.

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// create a corpus and show word cloud
loadCorpus("austen").tool("cirrus");
// create a corpus and show word cloud
loadCorpus("austen").tool("cirrus");
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