Are traditional and old forms of media “dead”? In our rapidly evolving digital world, how do the humanities and traditional literary analysis adapt? What is the intersection between the study of literature and the use of digital tools? How can new digital tools aid our practices of literary analysis?

Though the rise of digital technology within the last few decades may seem like a threat to traditional practices of analysis and close-reading, these practices are far from the brink of extinction. Rather, digital tools such as AntConc and Voyant augment traditional processes of analysis, enabling us to find new patterns, themes, and ideas within well-known literary texts. Online tools of distant reading, which compile and analyze entire corpora in seconds, allow scholars to create connections between words, chapters, or even disparate texts which are inaccessible to us by traditional reading alone. Digital “distant-reading” does not and cannot eradicate the importance of close-reading to the way that literary scholars interpret and understand texts; however, distant-reading facilitates the discovery of new layers of understanding which complicate or strengthen conventional interpretations. This blog should hopefully speak to English majors, writers, and scholars within the humanities, as it will discuss the ways in which technology and digital software enhance regular methods of reading, close-reading, and analysis.

The power and utility of digital analysis and “distant-reading” are readily apparent in my own work with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 novel Lady Audley’s Secret. The novel influenced and defined much of the sensation fiction genre, popularized in 1860s Victorian England, which found fascination with the dark and concealed secrets of ordinary society and the domestic sphere. Often, sensation novels centered upon crimes within the home, perpetrated by villainous or manipulative women seeking to evade societal restraints and conventions. Lady Audley’s Secret is no exception. Helen Maldon, abandoned by her impoverished husband, assumes a new identity and marries the wealthy Sir Michael Audley. When her past threatens to reemerge, as her first husband George returns from abroad and her nephew, Robert, begins to suspect her deceit, she goes to extreme lengths to prevent her new life from being ripped away. She lies, manipulates, and even attempts to murder George and Robert in order to remain ‘Lady Audley.’ However, George and Robert prevail, and after revealing her bigamy and violence to Sir Audley, the three men quietly send her to an insane asylum.

Traditional close-reading and analysis of Lady Audley’s Secret frequently point to these recognizable sensation fiction elements and themes occurring within the text: bigamy, the use of disguise and changing identities, the constraints of marriage and societal regulation upon women, letters as a plot device and provider of information, and crime hidden behind the guise of everyday life and society. Distant-reading of Lady Audley’s Secret through Voyant and AntConc confirm the existence and significance of these elements through digital analysis of word patterns and frequencies. When running the text through Voyant, the most frequent words suggest that Braddon sets the events of the novel among ordinary people and places: names and pronouns like “Audley,” “Lady,” “Robert,” “Phoebe,” and “Talboys” are utilized most often, as well as everyday places and objects including “house,” “door,” “room,” “letter,” “court,” or “train.” In addition, ominous, dark, and mysterious words like “night,” “secret,” “creature,” “grave,” “castle,” “cruel,” and “mad” repeatedly appear. In fact, the Voyant word cloud visually upholds the notion that dark secrets lurk underneath the surface of everyday life; the smaller (yet still frequent) words like “secret,” “grave,” and “cruel” peek out from behind larger words like “house,” “room,” and “door,” once again reiterating the coexistence of the ordinary and the dangerous in sensation fiction.

When removing the text’s common names and pronouns from Voyant, the digital tool unambiguously demonstrates the importance of dark, villainous, and almost frightening words for the development of the novel’s sensational plot. The words “death,” “dead,” “cold,” “dark,” “pale,” and “horrible” are presented as prominent words utilized by Braddon. Thus, Voyant visually establishes the novel’s reliance on these words as indicators of its adherence to common sensation elements. Braddon juxtaposes the ordinary and the extraordinary or frightening in order to create the novel’s sensationalism.

Because the domestic home becomes the site of crime, deceit, and death in Victorian sensation fiction, I chose to analyze the word “house” in Lady Audley’s Secret with AntConc, a digital concordance tool that identifies groupings of nearby words. Through this analysis, AntConc supports the duality of the house in this particular sensation novel as a place of ordinary societal action and a place of secretly dark or mysterious activity. “House” in the novel can be described as both “handsome,” “fine,” and “gorgeous,” while also referring to common public spaces for socializing like the “brew-house,” “public-house,” or “banking-house.” On the other hand, AntConc also associates “house” with sinister, frightening, or “sensational” words: “dreary,” “mad,” “old,” “broken,” “phantoms,” “dark,” “shivering,” and “haunted” all occur within a few places of “house” throughout the novel. Once again, the digital analysis tools emphasize and substantiate the ordinary as a disguise for the sensational and violent crime hidden under the surface of Victorian society.

Women regularly play the role of antagonist or villain within the sensation novel; thus, I was curious to see if AntConc could find patterns of words in Lady Audley’s Secret that illustrate the role of women in the novel or perhaps elucidate a subconscious, hidden, or unseen understanding of Lady Audley as a model for the “sensational” woman. Inputting “wom*n” as a search term in AntConc yields rather interesting results. The word woman is occasionally associated with positive adjectives and terms, such as “good,” “generous,” “beautiful,” “reasonable,” or “motherly.” These words seem to point out descriptors of Victorian women that were socially ideal and expected. However, the novel associates negative and pejorative words far more in conjunction with “wom*n.” Words like “death,” “disagreeable,” “hate,” “bitterness,” “miserable,” “tyranny,” and “murdered” all appear nearby “woman” or “women.” Even more telling, the words “wretched” (utilized 4 times), “wicked” (utilized 3 times), “mad” (utilized 10 times), and “guilty” (utilized 4 times) are employed frequently as common descriptors of Lady Audley and other women within the novel. Whether or not this reveals a type of misogyny or sexism inherent in the sensation genre, AntConc analysis makes it astonishingly clear that the vilification of Lady Audley is vital to the novel’s development and to its placement within the sensation genre. Though Lady Audley’s “secret” and violent behavior may not be readily apparent until the novel’s end, it seems that Braddon’s use of adjectives in relation to Lady Audley frequently identifies how readers should interpret and perceive the character.

These examples only begin to demonstrate the utility of digital technology in the work of the humanities. When brought together, traditional close-reading and digital distant-reading enable us to explore and challenge conventional interpretations of texts, find new meaning and patterns, and experience an entirely new method of reading.