Associative Concordance

Angus Forbes

The Associative Concordance is a tool for exploratory textual navigation. The basic concordant tool of association relies on matching words or phrases and contextualizing them within a window of previous and following words. This first implementation of the Associative Concordance follows this basic premise, but with a further view of extending the types of associations in various directions. These extensions might include textual indications of imagery, concepts, secondary sources, criticism and interpretation, metaphors, etc., as well as visual representations of the above, including actual images, photos, charts, graphs, etc. Many of these extensions will require external preprocessing-- a protocol for which has not yet been defined. For instance, a common feature of concordances is the ability to search for particular parts-of-speech or grammatical phrasing. While this information is inherent in the text itself it nonetheless involves some type of annotation (some of which can be done automatically). Other features are not as readily mapped directly to individual words or sentences and a goal of this project is to develop approaches for this mapping. 

The initial implementation eschews traditional search goals where a user begins with a query and the tool returns all matching results. Instead, the Associative Concordance starts its query at random and then chooses a random limited set of results based on user interaction (via the mouse). Each of these results can then instantly be re-queried for a new limited set of information. 

For instance, the Associative Concordance might be loaded with the 1955 edition of the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and choose "by the wizard sun --" as its point of departure. How many times does Emily Dickinson use the word "wizard" in her poems? Three times. And so the micro-poem is created:

     the wizard fingers never rest --

     by the wizard sun --

     ah, wizard erudite!

The user can continue to explore by mousing over a different word, or if there are numerous instances of a word, a different exploration using the same word. A slew of questions might occur. What are the cultural connotations of a wizard for Dickinson? Is there other occult imagery in her poems? What words/images collocate in her poems about wizards or the occult? How do other texts written in the 1800s talk about wizards? Does Dickinson talk about wizards in her letters? Have literary critics discussed her use of this word and what did they think about it? What is a wizard sun? Figuring out how to integrate explorations of these types of questions is another goal of this project.

Willard McCarty talks about humanities computing as a means to create "knowledge jukeboxes" and ultimately "modelling machines".  While clearly this project functions as the former, including various strands of information and interpretation may be an interesting place to think about what constitutes a model, a meaning, or an agenda. Or maybe not. 

As a creative generator, the Associative Concordance can be used to create novel re-readings or deformations of original text, alongside various relating infusions as mentioned above.

Here's another instomatic micro-poem from the word "trouble" (which appears four times throughout her poems):

     bound -- a trouble --

     unto like trouble -- trouble has enticed me

     half a transport -- half a trouble

     and so I trouble thee.

One more ("burn", 6 appearances):

     nor constellation burn --

     burn so the evening spires --

     and noon should burn -- 

     to think just how the fires will burn --

     how the hemlocks burn --

     as slow her flambeaux burn away

[I just realized I was only loading approximately the first quarter of her poems when making these micros. There are probably more instances of lines containing the words "trouble", "burn" and "wizard" than I indicated.]