Ben Blatt must be great at Mad Libs
I’m not sure if anyone has seen Blatt’s awesome tables before reading this article, but I came across them one day on my Tumblr dash and got a kick out of them. I am familiar with each of the three series he studied, and though I knew Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter definitely veered from each other in terms of context and audience, I had never thought about how stylistic choices played a role.
Textual analysis of YA novels can be helpful for children’s lit scholars and students interesting in determining why certain novels and their content have such resonance with contemporary teens? Do passing fads have any say? What about the ages of readers? (I went through my Twilight phase during the end of junior high/beginning of high school before I actually dated anyone, so all of those gushy adjectives Blatt has gathered rang true in my vampire loving heart.) However, without actually reading the respective texts, these analyses may not be as useful as they can be. Luckily, Blatt at least read a synopsis of each and could pinpoint how the distinctive adjectives and common sentences attributed to each author contributed to the tone and overall subject matter of each author.
As for my own thesis project, I never considered doing a similar word count analysis, but it would be interesting to see what words pop up between the two Gothic Poe stories that I am analyzing, “Berenice” and “Ligeia”. To be sure, I have noticed that Poe puts a lot of effort into his long winded descriptions of setting. How about crossing a Poe story with a Hitchcock script??? Since I am looking for one’s influence on the other, perhaps their similarities lie beyond the thematic.
1 Comment
L. M. Freer
February 18, 2014Divorced from the context of the article, do Blatt’s tables have more or less impact? It doesn’t surprise me that the images had their own distinct afterlife (on Tumblr and likely elsewhere too); more interesting to me is where they went, were they modified, and how people responded. It would be interesting to use a reverse-image search engine to try and figure that out.
In an ideal world, computational analysis of literary texts happens alongside an actual human encounter with that text, absolutely. The question for me is at what point the data gathering takes precedence over that encounter. Clearly Blatt felt like the 14 separate books he was interested in here were too much to read in full–he was probably writing this article with a quick turnaround time. Do we think his analysis would have been richer had he managed a deeper interaction with the text, or would that have clouded his data analysis? I’m not sure.