I’ve been working on a few projects that put digital technology in the service of close reading literary texts. This first one is called “Text Palettes,” a simple Python script that reads a text for its colors and then outputs a simple pie chart of the color distribution. It is limited and reductive, but in some ways this is the point. I will be refining this and the others for my “Literature by the Numbers” class next semester and am interested to see how it will work as a tool for close reading in the classroom.
This is a text palette of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat.” Not surprisingly, the color black dominates.
