Explore Themes within a Text

This exercise uses this Recipe and tools such as frequency list, a word finding service, a concordance and collocation to 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

This recipe and exercise will soon be available as a PDF download.

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:

love, passion, beloved, dear, dearest, honey, worship,
 adoration, as well as the antonyms hate, hatred, detest.

As we are specifically interested in the theme of love, all of these words can be applied to our task. If we were unsure about any of the ways in which these words might be used, we can explore word sense.

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:

150 entries found.
fearful  passage  of  their  death-mark'd  love, And  the  continuance  of  their  
makes  them  short. BENVOLIO In love?   ROMEO Out-- BENVOLIO Of  love? 
love? ROMEO Out-- BENVOLIO Of     love?  ROMEO Out  of  her  favour,  
favour,  where  I  am  in     love.   BENVOLIO Alas,  that  love,  so  
in  love. BENVOLIO Alas,  that  love,    so  gentle  in  his  view, 
in  proof! ROMEO Alas,  that     love,    whose  view  is  muffled  still, 
with  hate,  but  more  with     love.   Why,  then,  O  brawling  love! 
love. Why,  then,  O  brawling   love!   O  loving  hate! O  any  
not  what  it  is! This  love     feel  I,  that  feel  no  
feel  I,  that  feel  no   love    in  this. Dost  thou  not 
oppression. ROMEO Why,  such  is     love's    transgression. Griefs  of  mine  own  
With  more  of  thine:  this     love     that  thou  hast  shown Doth 
too  much  of  mine  own.  Love     is  a  smoke  raised  with  
sadness,  who  is  that  you  love.  ROMEO What,  shall  I  groan  
In  sadness,  cousin,  I  do     love    a  woman. BENVOLIO I  aim'd  
mark-man!  And  she's  fair  I     love.   BENVOLIO A  right  fair  mark,  
     
Word List (left of the keywords)   Word List (right of the keywords)
Summary: There are 339 unique words
and  there are  776  words in total.
235  words occurred once and 
45  words occurred twice.
Words Counts
My ------ 24
Thy ------ 20
Love ------ 15
You ------ 14
Romeo ------ 11
She ------ 8
Thou ------ 7
Your ------ 6
True ------ 5
Not ------ 5
Juliet ------ 4
Dear ------ 4
Lady ------ 4
Thee ------ 4
Can ------ 3
Sweet ------ 3
Must ------ 3
Shape ------ 3
Do ------ 3
From ------ 3
Mercutio ------ 3
Him ------ 3
Much ------ 3
Grace ------ 3
Therefore ------ 3
Paris ------ 3
Heart ------ 3
Here ------ 3
Benvolio ------ 3
Light ------ 3
Night ------ 2
More ------ 2   Summary: There are 341 unique words
and there are 775 words in total. 
222 words occurred once and 
49words occurred twice.
Words Counts
And ------ 22
I ------ 22
The ------ 17
Love ------ 15
A ------ 14
That ------ 13
So ------ 12
To ------ 12
O ------ 12
Be ------ 11
For ------ 11
Me ------ 11
It ------ 10
Not ------ 10
In ------ 10
Juliet ------ 9
Of ------ 9
Do ------ 8
But ------ 8
Is ------ 8
What ------ 8
Thy ------ 7
With ------ 7
Thou ------ 7
Romeo ------ 7
Now ------ 7
Her ------ 6
Which ------ 6
Like ------ 6
You ------ 6
Doth ------ 6
Night ------ 5

Some interesting avenues of attack emerge from this result. One of the clear facts that emerges is that this particular work seems to encompass the multifaceted aspects of love. Although there are references to deep, sweet love, there are also occassions of greif and death related to that same love. To explore these different facets, let's try finding direct combinations of some of the coordinate terms suggested.

Using the TAPoR Find Collocates Tool, with the wildcard 'lov*' to get a list of co-occurring words by frequency.

Looking at the words that collocate with the word love, it is clear that both of the aspects we identified are demonstrated. We may be particularly interested in some of the more tragic aspects of love in this work. Let's choose a particularly rich word, such as 'Grief' which collocates three time in the play and explore the context further to appreciate the specific theme of tragic love.

Use TAPoR Find Words - Concordance Tool with the words grief and love to explore this subtheme.

Your result should resemble:

2 co-occurrences found
somegrief shows much of  love;   But much of    grief  shows
haughty  Montague, That murder'd my  love's  cousin, with which grief, It

Repeat the above step for additional words which help to eleabourate on the subtheme.

As you can see from these few examples, a very comprehensive exploration of this work can be undertaken using these few simple tools.

Glossary

Collocation: Collocation refers to the occurrence of words adjacently more often than would be expected by chance.

A Complete Glossary

Next Steps/Further Information

-- ShawnDay - 21 October 2006

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Explore Themes within a Text

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