About This Project

Sources: The single source of information for this project was Boris Pahor's 2008 The Pyre in the Port, as translated into English by Nina Bjekovic. For additional information about this dataset, please visit the data critique section.

Processing: All data was collected from The Pyre in the Port by Boris Pahor as translated by Nina Bjekovic. It was processed by downloading the texts, which originally appeared in a single document. They were then separated into one document per short story to enable both holistic and individual analyses prior to being uploaded together to Voyant Tools, a text analysis tool. Voyant offers a plethora of useful text visualizations, but the most relevant for this project's purposes were the Cloud, Trends, and Context tools. These tools proved instrumental in identifying linguistic patterns and rhetorical devices. They served as the starting point for my research by making obvious Pahor's most used words, phrases, and strategies. From there, I was able to form conclusions about his diction and write my analysis.

Presentation: This presentation on select stories from Boris Pahor's The Pyre in the Port provides valuable insight into the texts. My goal was to provide viewers with useful presentations of this data to assist in comprehension of his diction, and also to aid in guiding my own research. Given the nature of Voyant Tools, there was little room for customization within the data visualizations. However, there was creative freedom in choosing which visualizations would most effectively display my data to convey my points. For example, I chose the Cloud tool over the Document Terms tool because while both provide information about the most frequently used words, the Cloud tool is much more visually appealing because it is colorful and varies in size, unlike the rather bland Document Tools list. Tools like Bubbliness and Microsearch may have been visually appealing and useful in tracking word usage, but were less applicable to such short texts.

For the researcher's About Me, visit the website's Contributors page.