shakespeare data mining assignment twelfth night

Hunter Ubersox 9/13/14 English 1102 Dr.Higinbotham Shakespeare Data Mining Assignment: Twelfth Night

In his comedy Twelfth Night, Shakespeare highlights the rampant flexibility of identity, desire,

and use of language throughout the play’s character interactions. More specifically, he emphasizes a

strong contrast between the situations and romantic attitudes of the play’s two main females: Olivia and

Viola. Looking at the above word map depicting the most common words in the entire work, “house”,

“love”, and “know” stand out particularly prominently as buzzwords pointing to this theme. The grand

majority of the play’s characters have established homes during the play’s timeframe, yet Viola (and

Sebastian too) stands alone in limbo due to her status as recently shipwrecked. Viola is also unique for

maintaining the same love interest throughout the entire course of the play and successfully fulfilling her

desire in marriage. In contrast, Olivia changes her romantic desire from refusing to love anyone to loving

Cesario (Viola) to marrying Sebastian in the end. However, unlike Viola, Olivia has a well-established

home as a prominent noblewoman in Illyria. Further evidence pointing to the striking contrast between

Olivia’s established home but fluctuating love interest and Viola’s romantic dedication but tenuous

position in the world can be easily seen though closer inspection of the text.

Hunter Ubersox 9/13/14 English 1102 Dr.Higinbotham

Viola uses the word ‘house’ a total of seven times, earning it a recognizable position on the above

word map of all of her lines throughout the play. However, when investigating the actual instances in

which the uses the word, it becomes readily apparent that she never refers back to having a true place

where she belongs in the world. Once, she even uses ‘house’ in a purposefully-ambiguous manner “I am

all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too” to throw off Orsino as to her origins

(2.4.132-134). Additionally, she uses the word ‘house’ four times to refer back to Olivia’s domain,

further emphasizing the fact that Viola has no where she truly belongs in the world during the majority

of the play’s duration.


In ironic contrast, Olivia only uses the word ‘house’ two times throughout the play, causing it to

be particularly absent from Olivia’s word cloud. However, both times Olivia is referring back to her own

domain through its usage. Thus while Shakespeare flips the number of times each female lead says the

word ‘house’, he makes the contrast between their positions in the world exceedingly poignant through

its usage.


When considering each character’s romantic intentions, Olivia uses the word ‘love’ a significant

total of 9 times, emphasizing that romantic interests are particularly high on her priority list. However,

the love interest she refers to changes on several occasions throughout the play. For example, at the

beginning of the play, Olivia repeats how she cannot love anybody at the moment, especially Orsino,

with her brother’s death so fresh in her mind. Yet, she quickly falls in love with Cesario (Viola) as he

repeatedly delivers her messages of Orsino’s love. It is even more striking that Olivia never outright says

that she loves Sebastian but marries him almost on the spot by romantic impulse. As a result, Olivia’s

fickle nature becomes readily apparent to the audience as everyone wonders who she’ll grow attached to

next.


Viola refers to ‘love’ a whopping twenty-three times during the duration of the play, far-

surpassing Olivia and proving that Viola is even further entrenched in the play’s comedic romantic

triangle. Although Viola (as Cesario) is tasked with the objective of convincing Olivia of Orsino’s love

as his messenger, Viola remains steadfast in her devotion and affection for Orsino. Unlike Olivia, her

romantic interest never changes throughout the entirety of the play, aided by her cross-dressing act as

Cesario and her true dedication to Orsino.


To further highlight this constant and consistent adoration, Viola only says the word ‘wife’ twice

throughout the play, once very near both the beginning and end. Each time, she is referring to her desire

to be Orsino’s wife. Thus, Shakespeare really drives home the point that while Olivia may have a

constant place in the world, her romantic interests fluctuate as rapidly as Viola’s identity changes

throughout the course of the play. Though Viola’s romantic interests remain constant, both contrasting

lead female characters firmly support Shakespeare’s emphasis on flexible identity and desire in Twelfth

Night.


Shakespeare Twelfth Night Data Mining-Reflection

The Shakespeare Data Mining assignment turned out to be strikingly different from

anything else I have ever done, as Voyant proved to be a particularly powerful but sometimes

quirky tool. The main intellectual goal of this assignment was to further investigate Shakespeare

by stepping back from a literature class’s close textual analysis in order to see the big picture and

the overarching trends with how Shakespeare uses language to construct his plays. In this sense,

it was always interesting to discover the contrast between the ways and frequency with which

each character used a few key words. These goals and my project’s focus directly connect to the

course’s main theme of determining the ethics of the authenticity of social interactions. This

assignment in particular centered on honing synthesis skills in which one must know which data

to search for in order to bolster their point or argument about the text. My purpose in this data-

mining assignment was to highlight the changing differences of identity and desire between

Twelfth Night’s two main female characters: Olivia and Viola. After the initial word cloud of the

entire text to establish the key terms of ‘love’, ‘house’, and ‘know,’ I made my purpose

pervasive throughout the presentation of the assignment by highlighting key times in which each

character refers back to my chosen assignment theme. To appeal to my audience of other GT

students who may also be investigating Twelfth Night, I made sure to present my information

visually with several word clouds as well as word counts and highlighted key text. Voyant is an

extremely powerful tool, but it does require a firm process of research for one to successfully

take full advantage of it. For example, one must always use the stop-words filter upon both the

word cloud and word count after inputting each next section of text. Although Shakespeare is

typically packed with original or uncommon words, Voyant proved to be an almost-perfect tool

for this assignment as careful planning resulted in what I believe to be a well-focused

presentation of my argument. Looking back, one of the only things I would change about my

Hunter Ubersox 9/13/14 English 1102 Dr.Higinbotham completion of this assignment is my lack of using a word tree for it would have made it easier for

my audience to determine the phrases in Shakespeare supporting my argument. However, at the

time I completed the assignment, Many Eyes refused to load its visualization on my computer for

some reason. Nevertheless, I am still quite pleased with how my argument developed through the

use of Voyant over the course of completing this assignment.

shakespeare data mining assignment twelfth night

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