Moby Dick Typography

So I made Moby Dick digital by taking the following excerpt from Chapter 10: A Bosom Friend and putting into a Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analysis machine. You can find the link for it here. Just put any text over 200 words into it for an analysis about what an author's writing reflects about his or her emotional and psychological state. I chose an excerpt from Chapter 10 for analysis simply because I like this chapter. I think Ishmael's reflections on his new friend Queequeg are interesting and heartwarming. Here's the excerpt.

"With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face--at least to my taste--his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes,fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous,but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.

Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence, never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous book. Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is--which was the only way he could get there--thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have 'broken his digester.'"

Here are the results. 

Liwc Dimension	Your Data	Personal Texts	Formal Texts
Self-references (I, me, my)	3.29	11.4	4.2
Social words	8.72	9.5	8.0
Positive emotions	3.29	2.7	2.6
Negative emotions	1.74	2.6	1.6
Overall cognitive words	5.81	7.8	5.4
Articles (a, an, the)	7.17	5.0	7.2
Big words (> 6 letters)	20.54	13.1	19.6

The numbers listed are in percentages. So for example, in the passage analyzed, 3.29% of the words from the passage were self-reference words. The percentages are also compared to a range of other personal and formal texts. So we see that Melville really didn't use very many self-reference words at all in this passage. I initially found this very surprising considering the entire book is from a first person perspective (Ishmael's), but I realized that this passage may not be as characteristic of the whole novel because Ishmael is primarily describing Queequeg in this passage. Or maybe it is reflective of the book as a whole since Ishmael spends a great deal of time describing the things and people around him. 

Here is what the word categories mean. Here is the link where I found this information.

Self-references: People who use a high rate of self-references tend to be more insecure, nervous, and possibly depressed. They also tend to be more honest.

Social words: Social words are words that make reference to other people (e.g., they, she, us, talk, friends). Generally, people who use a high level of social words are more outgoing and more socially connected with others.

Positive emotion words: The more that people use positive emotion words (e.g. happy, love, good), the more optimistic they tend to be. If you feel good about yourself, you are more likely to see the world in a positive way.

Negative emotion words: Use of negative emotion words (e.g., sad, kill, afraid) is weakly linked to people's ratings of anxiety or even neurotic. People who have had a bad day are more likely to see the world through negatively-tinted glasses.

Overall cognitive words: These are words that reflect how much people are actively thinking about their writing topic. Examples include: thinking, wonder, because, knowledge.

Articles: The three article words -- a, an, and the -- account for a huge percentage of the words we use. People who use articles at a high rate tend to be more concrete and impersonal in their thinking.

Big words (words with more than 6 letters): Use of big words is weakly related to higher grades and standardized test scores. People who use a high rate of big words also tend to be less emotional and oftentimes psychologically distant or detached.

Some interesting takeaways for me when looking at this data are 

1) For such a grim story, Melville uses a surprising amount of positive emotion words, more than most personal and formal texts.

2) Melville uses a high percentage of articles, yet according to the above information, people who use high amounts of articles "tend to be more concrete and impersonal in their thinking." However, I would not describe the tone of Moby Dick as impersonal. I think it is very personal. Ishmael is a very personable narrator, so this analysis seems to be a little off. 

3) Melville uses a lot of big words; 20.54% of the words in this passage are 6 letters or longer. I think this is interesting because this percentage is much closer to formal texts and a great deal above that of personal texts. We know that Moby Dick's form is hard to define: is it a novel, en epic, etc? However it is a non-fiction story, and people recognize it as a novel, so it surprises me that in this part of its analysis, it reads like a formal piece. I guess I always considered novels to be more like personal texts than formal ones.

Congratulations if you've read this whole blog post and made it down to this point. Do any of these findings strike you as interesting? Do you think they are accurate? This type of analysis is obviously not an exact science, but I think it is still revealing.