Text Analysis
The text analysis for the lone humor piece reported a vocabulary density of 0.499 and 17.9 average words per sentence. The most frequent words in the corpus are officer (7); lieutenant (5); salute (5); generals (4); company (3). Performing text analysis on a humor piece presents similar challenges as those found in performing text analysis on poetry. As described in the Poems text analysis section, the use of figurative language in poetry makes summary information, such as most frequently used words, take on a different meaning. Because figurative language often allows words to take on alternative meanings or be used in unexpected ways, summary information must be closely tied to the context of the poem. It is always important to not abandon the text’s context when using summary information derived from a text analysis – however one of the values of text analysis is the potential to analyse massive amounts of text that would otherwise be impossible for a human to read and comprehend. So, one downside of text analysis on poetry and other genres that use figurative language heavily, such as humor, is the fact that the interpretation of the analysis relies on human understanding of the text which is only derived through manually reading.
But, let’s put this digression to the side for a moment, because there is still value in the summary information from the text analysis on this humor piece. Voyant has tools that illustrate more of the text’s context. For example, the textual arc below illustrates the progression of frequent words throughout the text.
Ideally, a text analysis on a humor piece would identify elements of narrative structure that we know casually as jokes. The text arc begins to undertake this task with the first iteration which identifies the sequence of words that compose the text’s opening quip – “How to Recognize an Army”.
“How to Recognize an Army”
Sit on a hillside by a road on a hot day.
Place one ear to the ground and listen for the tramp of feet.
Place the other ear to the trunk of a tree and listen for the hum of angry words. When a great amount of cussing and tramping is heard you may at once know an Army is approaching.
Caution: Be sure to wait for the cussing -otherwise the tramping is probably a herd of cattle.
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