Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as

as Analyzed by TextArc

by

Trevor Wilkes

LIS 554

Fall 2014

How I Began the Project

● I began this project by rereading Crime and Punishment.

● I keep a spreadsheet of the

words in the novel that

pertained to the theme of

“mental illness” in Raskolnikov’s

character.

● I soon abandoned the spreadsheet

approach, because there were more

efficient ways to approach the project.

Text Visualization Attempt # 1

The first text visualization tool I explored was Wordle:

http://www.wordle.net/

● I cut and pasted the e-

text of ch. 1 of the

novel into Wordle.

● The word frequencies

made a nice collage.

● Word frequencies do

not tell the full story.

Textual Visualization Attempt # 2

● I tried out the Voyant Tools

text visualization tool:

http://voyeurtools.org/tool/Links/

● When pasting in the text for

ch. 7 of Crime and Punishment,

Voyant Tools did not eliminate

stop words automatically.

● Having the stop words as main nodes

of the tree created a visualization, which

was not particularly useful.

Textual Visualization Attempt #3

This 3rd visualization

was done by using

Docuburst:

http://vialab.science.uoit.

ca/docuburst/index.php

The layout of the term

“depression” was

interesting; however,

Docuburst looked for

definitions of depression

other than those of

melancholy.

The InfoVis Tool I Selected: TextArc

● TextArc (http://www.textarc.org/) is a textual

visualization tool that allows many lines of text

to be sifted through in a short time.

● The box on the right says,“Show text,”

which allows for text searching in the novel.

● Highlighted is one of the

sentences in the novel I

wanted to visualize.

TextArc Visualization: Raskolnikov

● Here is a

visualization of

the frequency

of the word

Raskolinkov.

● The orange

rays link out to

the grey ellipse

where the

protagonist’s

name occurs in

the green text.

Using the Concordance with TextArc

● By employing the

concordance

TextArc allows

for a search of

the word

“anxiety.”

● The 31 occurrences of the

word “anxiety” are mapped

out with orange rays to the

places they appear in the

text in green bands.

Mapping Specific Words in the Text

● Here is an example of

highlighting the key

words that occur in a

sentence in Crime and

Punishment.

● These words are then

mapped out to places the

occur throughout the body

of the text. Notice

“position,” “late,”

“ceased,” “weighing,”

“anxiety,” and “poverty”

are all mapped.

Associations with Romanovitch

● Here is an example of an

association mapping to see the

words and character names that

Raskolnikov’s middle name

Romanovich links to.

● In this picture, only the orange

rays relating to Romanovich are

drawn to the outside grey ellipse.

Associations with Sonia

● Above are the association mappings for Sonia, the daughter of

Marmeladov, who Raskolnikov falls in love with.

● Listed are links between “Sonia,” “Raskolnikov,” her mother, and father.

Associations with Razumikin

● To the right are the

associations

between,

Razumikin,

Raskolnikov’s

schoolmate, and

other characters.

● Razumikin’s

character is

displayed through

the adjectives

used.