For my final presentation in DH Methods I am going to be using as many of the skills we’ve dabbled in this semester as I can. My hope is to run some streamlined, computational explorations on a .txt file holding the full text of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

You can see on the page featured in Fig 1 a sampling of the substantial number of mathematic and statistical material used in the narrative, and I am hoping to utilize a full tool kit to pull some relevent information from the text.

Fig 1: http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com

Possible Exploration Techniques Include:

• XML/XSLT – At some point in the process, possibly for web publication purposes, I may markup portions of the text in XML.
• RegEx – Going to go back through some general RegEx functionality so that I can denote positions in the text that I want to break down using…
• R Language – I’ve been running some early tests on the corpus using R… I’ve been able to do a word count, and to take a number of words and map out their usage on a timeline, as the screenshot labeled Fig 2 shows:

Fig 2: An R Visualization illustrating the chronological usage of the word “rocket” in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

Much of the R code I’ve been experimenting with that is specifically relevent to those interested in playing with literature data, I found here: http://www.matthewjockers.net/materials/dhwi-2013/dhwi-code/