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Christina Dinh Nguyen

Visualizing Tolkien with R

See the Git repo here!

All photos, unless otherwise noted, are used courtesy of David Dobrzański. These include remixes of David Dobrzański's photographs.

Click here to learn about this project, and how you can follow along with the code!

Featured sub-projects:

1. Getting R to do what we need

This sub-project is an introduction to using R to study fictional (especially fantasy) works - I look at the previous literature on this subject and consider what NLP R packages might be best suited for the following projects in Visualizing Tolkien with R.

2. Sentiment in Tolkien's short stories outside of Middle-Earth

This sub-project calculates and and graphs the sentiment from Tolkien's short stories that weren't set in Middle-Earth. That includes Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, and Roverandom.

3. Sentiment in Tolkien's short stories in Middle-Earth

This project looks at calculating and graphing (i.e. visualizing) the sentiment from Tolkien's short stories that were set in Middle-Earth. That focuses on the Beren and Luthien poem* and Adventures of Tom Bombadil*.

*In hindsight, I wonder if we can count narrative poems as short stories.

4. Sentiment in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion

This project looks at calculating, graphing (i.e. visualizing), and comparing the sentiment from Tolkien's most famous stories set in Middle-Earth.

5. Token distribution analysis in Leaf by Niggle

This project looks at the occurances of picture (i.e. the painting) and tree in Leaf by Niggle in an attempt to understand how an inverse relationship might reflect the path of the plot (earth to paradise).

6. Token distribution analysis in The Lord of the Rings

This project documents the occurances of a multitude of words in The Lord of the Rings in order to support the project called "Topic modelling of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion."

7. Topic modelling The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion

Does warfare really take up a majority of The Hobbit, or is it arguments and conversation? How do we decide how to sort these topics? How does LOTR and Silmarillion compare? Find out in this comparative project.

8. Topic modelling Children of Hurin and Kalevala

We know that CoH was heavily influenced by the Finnish Kalevala. How can topic modelling show us the common themes and their occurances between the two texts? This is an extremely intertextual analysis with plenty of close and distant reading combined.

contact

Contact Me

Stuck on some code? Want to geek out about Tolkien studies and computational analysis? Shoot me an email anytime!

christinadinh.nguyen at mail.utoronto.ca

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