Text-Mining Short Fiction by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright using Voyant Tools

CLA Journal

Vol. 59, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE: Digital Humanities (March 2016), pp. 251-258

Published by: College Language Association

Although scholars and students are inclined to study African American literary texts in chronological order, digital software creates opportunities to conceptualize useful alternative sequences as well. In particular, text-mining software has made it possible to use the word densities (the ratio of content words to grammatical words) of literary works as a basis for the arrangement of author compositions. Studying short stories by black writers based on word densities reveals linguistic patterns that often go unrecognized when only chronology is privileged. This article explains the results of utilizing text-mining software to rethink the typical ordering of canonical African American short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Charles Chesnutt, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin. Furthermore, my article raises the possibility of digital software informing alternative approaches to sequencing literary texts.