Tomorrow is the Signum University Fundraiser’s Hallowe’en Extravaganza!  I’m preparing to chat with The Tolkien Professor and Dave Kale about my work in digital humanities – and Dave said something about pie.

Part of our plan tomorrow is for audience participation lexomics graphs – do we ever know how to have fun?  Yes, we do!  So let me know now in the comments if there’s a particular word or group of words you’re curious to know about in the text of The Hobbit. If I have a few delicious words ahead of time, I can prepare well, while still accepting on-the-fly requests.

Why only in The Hobbit?  Preparing a text for this kind of analysis takes many, many months of “scrubbing” the text.  I began with typing up the text myself so that no one ever worried about pirating issues.  That’s the .txt file I use when I run the Lexos software.  Then I marked the text up with paragraph numbers and little xxs to mark the ends of phrases.  In the end, my personal text of The Hobbit,  the one I use to run the concordance software, looks like this:

[01.001] xx In a hole xx in the ground xx there lived a hobbit. xx Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, xx filled with the ends of worms xx and an oozy smell, xx nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole xx with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: xx it was a hobbit-hole, xx and that means comfort. xx
[01.002] xx It had a perfectly round door xx like a porthole, painted green, xx