Pride and Prejudice Text Analysis
Analysis of Couples in Pride and Prejudice: How Jane Austen Deliver Her Viewpoint on Marriage
This study is an analysis of the relationship between characters in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice through natural language processing in Python. The original file can be find in here. Below are some excerpts from the study.
Timeframe
August 2019
Team
Solo
The Stair-like Structure
The dispersion plot shows characters' patterns of appearance. It appears as a stair-like structure. Each couple appears like one staircase, appears frequently in certain parts of the story, and then give way to stories of other couples. This reveals from a quantifying perspective how Jan Austen deliberately designed her plot.
The Secondary Meaning of Words
The relationship chart above examines the relationship between characters and the relationship between characters and certain words. The latter reveals the secondary meaning of the word "husband," "wife," "family," and "love."
For example, The word "husband" links relatively strongly with Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennet. Both characters share a same feature: their marriage is very much need based. This thus indicates that "husband" carries a functional implication besides its emotional connotation.
Reflection
Similar to my analysis of the user behavior in subreddit r/AmItheAsshole, this study is also made possible through a combination of close and distant reading. The use of both the tech and the humanities again revealed the potential to conduct deeper interdisciplinary studies.