Author: lfsaldenbirch

To Lexos with Love

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In preparing for tomorrow’s Hallowe’en Extravaganza, I tried out a new-to-me feature of Lexos.  I ran into a little glitch and, late-ish on a Friday afternoon, sent a question to the team of professors who run the project.  In 45 minutes I had an offer of help and within an hour found myself in a lovely discussion of how to make the graphs of Lexos easier to read and interpret.  Huge accolades to the gentlefolk of the Lexos Project!

Any Requests?

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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

10K tag complete

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It took a while, but all the Concordance entries so far have been tagged “10K” so that we can make some new entries of common words this weekend.  A good handful of the entries to date will also get the new “common” tag, of course, as they are common words spelled in a gollumesque way.

Hallowe’en Extravaganza!

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Word fans, have you registered for the Hallowe’en Extravaganza?  Dave Kale and I will join the Tolkien Professor to kick off the final day of the Signum University annual fundraiser.  We’re talking spreadsheets, wordstats, text mark up, and even more thrilling wordy things of lexical goodness!

I’ll demonstrate the Lexos software!

You – yes, you! – can request particular words to be mapped or added to the concordance!

Click the Hallowe’en Extravaganza link, register for free, join us at 10 AM Eastern Daylight Savings time, and enjoy a grand adventure from the comfort of your armchair!  Then, donate generously to the work of Signum U: world class post-secondary education accessible to all!

Lately

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What’s happening lately in the project is a boatload of behind-the-scenes work.  I am not surprised (but still chagrined) to learn that repetitive tasks I could have completed in a day when I was 100% focused on this project take many, many weeks when I am returned to the workaday world of family and profession.

I have been proofreading, correcting entries in my spreadsheet, double-checking for words which got lost between the cracks, searching for more onomatopoeia, and making judgement calls on a few more food words (like dining-room).  Today I am still marking the uncommon words with the 10K tag so that I’ll be ready to add more common words very soon.  Already the post of Feminine Pronouns is crying out to become the official entry on “She”.

Feminine Pronouns

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The conversation on The Language Log has turned to feminine pronouns and how many there are in which books.

Here are our Hobbit feminine pronoun references by paragraph number:

[01.005] after she became Mrs. Bungo Baggins.
[01.005] built the most luxurious hobbit-hole for her
[01.005] (and partly with her money)
[01.005] her only son,

[19.011] And bright are the windows of Night in her tower.

There are no occurrences of the word “hers”.

Update 2015.10.18: the chapter 19 reference.  I find upon cursory search that neither Quenya nor Sindarin have “feminine” and “masculine” nouns, so we can take the Night reference as anthropomorphization or perhaps a reference to a nature deity form (in the manner that hobbits call the sun “she”).

Text Encoding Initiative

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Have you heard of the Text Encoding Initiative?  It’s a collegial group of scholars defining and communicating the standards for digital text coding, tagging, and so much more!  I’m excited to learn about it, and to browse all the resources, conferences, and workshops.  The Women Writers Project (which I believe is based at Northeastern University) has an introductory seminar coming up in November.  Scroll down to their resources pages – much to learn.

After my exciting project inventing the wheel, I love learning that scholars from all over are committed to creating a portable and robust wheel!