Wordling Plato
This is part two of my last post. I want to experiment with some of Moretti’s ideas. Here, I am going to take a text from one author, put it through Wordle, and see what happens. I want to see the effect of taking the words out of context following this method. The book I choose is The Republic by Plato. I realize it may be a random choice for a history class, but I know the book, so I can judge what Wordle does. More importantly, all of The Republic is available online, so I can copy and paste it into Wordle.
I copied the book from Gutenberg.org from a link in Wikipedia. I pasted the whole thing, minus the commentary and legal disclaimers at the end, into Wordle and the image below came up.
I will begin with a few initial reactions. First, I would never use Wordle to summarize a text for me, as if I were to take the largest words in the word cloud to be the main points of the book. The main topic of The Republic is justice, which appears on the middle left. It is about half the size of the largest words, true, may, good, one, and yes.
Why, then, are true, may, good, one, and yes the largest words? The most interesting thing these words suggest is the importance of conversation in The Republic. After all, the book is just an extended conversation between Socrates and other characters. In this light, then, it makes sense that yes is a prominent word, because one of the hallmarks of Plato’s dialogues is people usually agree with Socrates. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but not so much in The Republic. At most for this book, people disagree with him at first, but he convinces them in the end.
What about the other words? I did a quick search in the text for each. True seems to come up most often in agreement—as in the following, typical line, “That is true, he replied”–rather than in conversations about what is truth. May seems to appear in conversation as part of a verb, as in the following line I found: “everything that deceives may be said to enchant.” One is similar to may in that it often is just the grammar of a sentence, as when someone says, “one may not have the will, or the other the power, to harm us.” It is also appears incidentally, in which case it is not the topic of the conversation. For example, characters often use it with examples to make their points: “do you admit that one man is a musician and another not a musician.” In that last example, one is not the topic of conversation, as if Socrates and his friends were talking about the number. Rather, one is used for the conversation.
Good is more complicated than those other words. There are references to goods—meaning items—good behavior, what is good, good and evil, goodness, the highest good, the term good, and responses, as when someone says in agreement, “very good.” The word good, then, is as used in conversation and is a topic of conversation. That still, I believe, does not take away my main point that the largest words in the word cloud have mostly to do with conversation rather than any particular topic.
Does this mean that Wordle in this case is useless for understanding The Republic? No. Though the word cloud is not useful for pinning down the main topics of the book, the cloud reminds readers that conversation is important. The latter point is something from my experience that is not usually mentioned about Plato. When people discuss him, they focus on his ideas like his vaunted Theory of Forms, not the way he conveys his ideas. One of my philosophy professors here at Mason liked to say that Papyrus is expensive, so everything in Plato, including conversational elements, are important. I think Wordle reinforces that point. Maybe the reason is that, as much as people want to pin Plato down on some point, he is more interested in how ideas form.
My final conclusion about Wordle is it can be a useful tool for examining texts, if used in the correct way. I could get more from a better application, of course, but at least Wordle is a start. Considering how important texts are for historians, historians need to use every method available for analysis.
