Friday 24 July 2009

Mapping the thesis

The storms continue... sporadic torrential rain in Edinburgh, with dirty brown rivers flowing down the New Town streets and riding up onto the pavements every time they meet the wheel of a parked car. No time to blog today - thesis calls. So here's a wordshot of said thesis to date (sorry for the size of the image, I don't seem to be able to make it any bigger):


No great surprises, I think, except perhaps Cambridge, which must be in there because I included the bibliography. Maybe I need to use more synonyms for 'however', 'might' and 'also', and I certainly use 'rather' rather too much.

3 comments:

Renaissance Girl said...

That's pretty hilarious, actually. I'm thinking such a map would be a helpful tool, and should be part of all scholarly books' front matter...

moria said...

I'm glad you decided to post the word-map! It's a weirdly elegant tool. I like the prominence of "yet" in yours - that word is a tic of a mentor of mine that I have always found impossibly endearing.

Agree with RG on promotional materials.

Polvo said...

Ha ha! I've finally worked out how I can leave comments on my own blog (as thought blogging itself weren't vain and self-absorbed enough...). Given my problems in coming up with a catchy title for the thesis, I was thinking that perhaps I could just use the wordmap in its place, but I suspect that's the kind of manoeuvre that goes down better when working on formally experimentalist contemporary poetry, than it would with early moderners.

The really interesting results came when I stuck Astrophel and Stella through the programme - but for some reason the resulting image is even smaller, once loaded on here, so small that I had to remove it again. The experiment has made me more interested than I was, though, in the fascination among some in our department with running literary works through computer programmes...