The Words of the Rings

I created this research site because I wanted to show that word frequency does equate importance and prove my thesis by using Voyant to display the frequencies with the related books and the relationship between the frequency and the story of each book. In creating this site, I wanted fans of Tolkien, as well as those interested in The Lord of the Rings to visualize that Tolkien’s way of writing is delicately vital to each book’s story. My intent was to examine if word frequency equates importance in the Lord of the Rings, and what would the relationship be between the frequency of those words and the story being told of each book.

I wanted to make a project that either hasn’t been done before or wasn’t common. I did a bit of googling and couldn’t find any website that analyzed the word frequency and its relation to the book’s story, so this idea was perfect. Tolkien is very precise with his writing and therefore frequently-used words would naturally be of more importance. Voyant was a perfect tool to find the relationship between the word frequency and the story. Having a digital visualization can guide the reader towards information that is important and can lead to a deeper understanding of the texts. Using Voyant, I was able to have this visualization of frequent words and where they could be found so I could create an analysis for their connection with my associated texts. With the use of Voyant, I was able to see how the frequent words showed a connection with the narrative of the Lord of the Rings. Both the digital visualization and the physical narrative text have significance to how the reader understands the literature. With the physical text, readers can enjoy the story that Tolkien has created and analyze it from what they interpret from the text. With the digital visualization, readers can see data and connections that appear in the novel and draw a connection with the text, which is what my project is about.

I decided to use my vast knowledge of Tolkien’s Legendarium in my project, so I chose an Unessay blog, where I could analyze the data from Voyant in order to prove my thesis. Voyant was a perfect and easy tool that could detect frequent words found across all three books and show data about the frequency of a word per book, relationship between frequent words, and much more. If you are interested in viewing the Voyant page of my data, please be sure to visit this link.

If I had ten more weeks to work on this project, I believe I would examine less frequent words and their relationship to each book’s story. I thought about including it in this project, but I wouldn’t have enough time to conduct the research needed to do it justice.

While making this project, I discovered the pleasure of merging my own passions with my coursework. I found that I enjoy research more when it includes a topic that is of great interest to me.