A Friday night with Hammett
9 02 2007I have decided, possibly foolishly, to analyze text patterns found in The Glass Key. The idea was raised that a pattern should be explored not only in a single paragraph of text, but across the whole novel. I chose to do this because:
1. I have no life.
2. I’m sick, and therefore have no desire for a life, despite it being Friday night.
3. Hammett is my substitute for a life.
4. I feel a little guilty about being so far behind on blog posts last week.
5. This numbered list is ending now.
I have utilized the handy random number table found here to select 10 page numbers, and then simply analyzed sentence word count in each page. (I considered doing it for the first paragraph on each page, but the paragraphs are frequently filled with dialogue, which makes it a little difficult to identify real paragraphs.) *NOTE: I am using my copy of The Glass Key, which I borrowed from the library (resulting from an irrepressible desire to save money) and is, in fact, a collection of all of Hammett’s works. Therefore, the page numbers are not the same as the ones in the class copies of the novel. The Glass Key is on pages 591-777. This difference is unimportant and won’t change the data significantly. I knew there was a reason* I took AP Stat in high school.
*other than masochism
Here are the graphs of each page…
655:
641:
637:
713:
692:
747:
673:
734:
715:
718:
So there it is. Let me know if you want me to do anything else with the data; it’s only 8pm and I’ve got the rest of the night to fill with similarly geeky pursuits…
First, it’s fun to look at these graphs; it does something interesting (in *my* mind, anyway) to think of style and emotional/cognitive experience this way. So thanks for the cool stuff, as always.
Second, I wonder if page is going to work as a unit of analysis here. For my paradigm (or analytical perspective) to work, the unit one graphs has to have been a meaningful unit of composition for the writer/filmmaker themselves. So, for example, for a writer a paragraph or sentence would be meaningful, but a page would in all likelihood be at the mercy of the edition. (Which raises another interesting question about whether writers would like to specify page breaks–I suspect they would–but I digress.) For a filmmaker, the unit of meaning would be the scene or episode. Chapter divisions in DVDs, though not commonly specified by the filmmaker, are nevertheless an indication of this unity; the very word “chapter” makes sense as a metaphor in this respect.
Dialogue does make it difficult to say what’s a “paragraph” in Hammett, which is why the example I used in class came from a paragraph of exposition/introduction at the beginning of a chapter. Perhaps it would be interesting to graph the paragraph at the beginning of each chapter, and look at whether a) there were patterns in each case and b) there was an overall pattern as the book progressed.
The “so what?” question now looms. For me, this stuff is meaningful because it gives us a basic way to think and talk about style and experience with some precision. Duration and length are straightforward measures, and those time dimensions have immediate significance for experience, given the importance of the temporal in experience generally.
Thanks for carrying this work forward. I think there are some interesting stylometric possibilities here.