For our digital humanities project, my partner and I are studying the literary work of the William Blake, an author who is strongly known for his visionary paintings as well as poetic literature as part of the Romantic Age. We chose a few of his books to analyze with distant reading, which is an approach where a computer program processes big data and provides insight on the content of this data. We used Voyant Tools which is a web-based text reading and analysis environment for distant reading.

Our corpus is an anthology of books, poems, and other literary work done by the author William Blake. We included five texts in our corpus which are: Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), America a Prophecy (1793) , Europe a Prophecy (1794), and Milton (1810) . We got our texts from The Gutenberg Project and PDF drive.

Some of the research questions before we used Voyant Tools were related to Blake’s influence after he died and why his work was properly appreciated only after his death. After using VT, our research questions became centered on the theme in Blake’s work. Some of the questions are: What is the predominant theme in Blake’s work? How is the theme in his poems related to his artwork?

We started by uploading one of the texts, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, we saw that the words god, man, men, and angel were used more frequently than others. We uploaded another text, America a Prophecy and Europe a Prophecy. In this text none of the frequent words were common with the frequent words of the first text, instead the words that appeared most frequently were form, image, night, auckland, and red. To observe the frequencies of these words we first looked at Cirrus and then the graph that illustrated the trends of these words throughout the text.

In his book, Milton, the word milton appeared 66 times while satan appeared 88 times and los appeared the most, 101 times. In Blake’s work, Los is the fallen form of one of the four zoas. The name Los is an anagram of the word Sol which is “sun” in Latin. It appears that Los, Milton and Satan were the predominant characters in this peom. The word god also appears a lot, 58 times, which has also been frequently found in his book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

In the picture above we can see that when the word satan appeared the most, the word los also appeared the most. When we examined this section of the text, we found that in this part of the novel los and satan interacted the most.

It appears that the word los does not appear in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell which shows us that the character los is not in the first book, but appears later in the other book Milton.

Blake seems to follow mythological themes related to heaven, hell, god, satan, and humans. We have discovered that Blake had a strong religious faith but opposed all forms of organised religion.

In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the words little, night, love, joy, happy, and sweet appeared the most. This is a change in theme from death and hell as in the other books we mentioned before.

In general, our corpus had a central theme of god, man, satan, death, and eternity.

In his earlier works, such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the context was happy and cheerful, and the poems were not fictional. When he started his series of mythological writing the main theme was biblical prophecy expressing his personal and revolutionary beliefs.

Voyant Tools was not as user friendly as we had hoped. We had trouble uploading some of our texts and the software was slow to process changes in our input. For example, when we clicked on different texts, VT would not display them. Also, the graph would get altered or disappear completely at random times. Even though it was not very friendly and easy to use, VT has useful features for our project, and helped us a lot with our distant reading.

Distant reading through Voyant Tools proved to be very beneficial and gave us a general comprehension of Blake’s ongoing themes that occurred in his work without us having to read them closely. It also helped us acquire an understanding of Blake’s intention in his writings.