Romeo and Juliet without Romeo and Juliet

Like I mentioned previously, I began this project tired, under a time restraint, and with no idea of where it would lead me.  However, I had hope.  At a few research meetings previously, Bill Blake had mentioned doing some work with Docuscope in the sense of Hamlet without the Prince.  While I had never really seen the result of his work, the idea of a play without its main character or main characters enticed me.  It didn’t take me long to find my favorite play, Romeo and Juliet, and sit down at my computer.  Referencing my second edition of the Riverside Shakespeare, I cut and pasted lines spoken by each of the characters throughout the play until I had, technically, two different plays.  I retained the initial text file, split it up by Act again, and then created a new text file for the whole play, without any of Romeo or Juliet’s lines.  I also separated the Acts again, without their lines, and created two new files; one with all of Romeo’s lines and with Juliet’s.  The images I came up with are below.  The methods remained the same from the previous post: Hierarchical Cluster, Best Guess Analysis, Ward’s test, Colored Coded Dendrogram with a Distance Scale performed at a Cluster level analysis of Docuscope’s output.

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Epic

Just like the start of any good epic, the invocation of my personal muses in the previous post signifies the beginning of what I would like to think is an epic progression in my life.  However, the beginnings of my research with digital methods were not so grandiose as what Milton or Homer has left us.  I was given Docuscope in February of 2010 and received JMP training in early March.  I played around with both of them for a while, but due to school work and the demanding nature of my student organization (I was gone six weekends in a row spanning from late March to early May), I was not able to do as much as I wanted.  However, on April 30th a digital salon was hosted by the libraries to “Showcase Digital Arts and Humanities at UW-Madison”.  Prof. Witmore, whose blog Wine Dark Sea deals with a lot more of this kind of work and has a link on the right, invited me to present at this conference-style salon, together with him, Bill Blake, and Prof. Valenza.  About a week out from the presentation date, I sent Prof. Witmore a PowerPoint with the images clustered below.  There are two sets of three, the first of Shakespeare’s Canon and the second of looking at King Lear and Cymbeline solus, divided by acts.  All the pictures are JMP generated Hierarchical Clusters, using Frequency Counts from Docuscope and a Ward’s test with best guess analysis and a distance scale dendrogram.  (distance scale: distances in the dendrogram are proportional to the actual statistical distance)   The first images of both sets are after I ran the test using the Clusters or highest and broadest level of relationship between the data sets.  The second in each set is using Dimensions, or the mid-level analysis and the third is using the LAT’s (Language Attribute Types) with the finest grain of similarity.

Initial Standings

By starting this blog, I wish mainly to create and maintain a space for the development and expansion of my ideas as both a humanist as well as a digitalist.  Before going further, I would like to credit Prof. Michael Witmore for all of the input and assistance he has given me, as well as the research tools and methods he has provided.  Without him, I would probably be doing less important things currently.  I would also like to thank William (or Bill) Blake, another individual who has given me incredible insight and aid while taking time out of his own schedule. I must also give credit to Prof. Eric Raimy, who first introduced me to Prof. Witmore and this kind of research and who is another person who has helped hone my perception at both a linguistic and analytical level.  To those above and to all of the teachers I have encountered in my course of life but haven’t mentioned, I thank you.