Reading with a computer

Reading with a computer is the most interesting thing I have ever encountered in my reading life. I always like the easy way to doing work especially intellectual work like readings research papers and analyzing data.

Ever since I was introduced to computer programming a year ago, I have been looking for ways to automate several tasks in order to save time as well as energy.

Voyant is an amazing tool which is used to analyze digital texts. In this practice, I analyzed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Zanzibar tales by the native of the coast. I was able to easily compare a relationship among all the texts. This is a very helpful approach when one is researching a topic and need to know how it was written by different authors or different versions.

On the circus section of Voyant, “said” is the most visible word and then comes “holmes”, “man” etc. From this small observation, a frequent mentioning ‘said’ and the character’s name, it can be inferred that The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes were narrated in a third person perspective (another person telling a story of another person). Also, it can be concluded that the author of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes mentions their characters more frequently than the author of the Harry Potter stories. However, this may be a biased conclusion since I only used only one Harry Potter text and 6 Sherlock Holmes texts.

I read more in a short time this way. I was able to know the highlights of the stories. Links and trends helped me to easily visualize the texts and find any relationship between them and across different articles. However, this may only be a good technique when someone is more interested in the styles of the authors and not the messages which they provide. I was just trying to imagine how it could be if I had to read all the Harry Potter stories this way!