Explore Themes within a Text
Introduction
This exercise uses this Recipe and tools such as frequency list, a word finding service, a concordance and collocationto explore a particular theme within a text.
This exercise applies the recipe to a textual example which is freely available on the internet so you can complete the steps yourself and see the results.
Exercise Steps
- In this example we will use William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and explore the theme of love.
- This text is available at MIT.
- Use WordNet to generate a list of words related to the theme love.
- Submit the term love to WordNet and you should get a list of words similar to:
- You can proceed in two different ways at this point. You can generate a word list and see if there are any matches, or you can start searching for the particular words identified by EVA.
- To explore the theme, enter each of the synonymous words as search terms using the TAPoR Find Words - Concordance Tool to explore their textual contexts.
- Inputting the term love into the concordance tool returns the following result:
- Using the TAPoR Find Collocates Tool, with the wildcard 'lov*' to get a list of co-occurring words by frequency.
- Use TAPoR Find Words - Concordance Tool with the words grief and love to explore this subtheme.
- Your result should resemble:
- Repeat the above step for additional words which help to eleabourate on the subtheme.
Further Information
Submitted by Jinman on Wed, 03/08/2017 - 12:51