In my experimenting for Lab 2, I used the online literary tools Voyant and Lexos to diagram my various findings. I decided to focus on the side text of the novel, Only Revolutions for both Hailey and Sam.

I created this first graph, and the next three, using Voyant. I was curious to see how many times the numbers “1 & 3” were used throughout the side text for Hailey.

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The next graph looks at the numbers “2 & 4”

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The following two graphs are focused the side text in Sam’s side of the novel.

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The next two images were created using Lexos and are what the site calls “Multiclouds”. Again, these are centered around the side texts of Hailey and Sam. The bigger the word/symbol, the more often it appears in the text.

Here is Sam’s section:

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Hailey’s section:

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Lab 2 was designed to teach us new and more sophisticated ways of viewing the novel Only Revolutions. We were provided with a number of different online resources, including sites such as, Voyant and Lexos, to help us learn more about the text. Additionally, we were provided with the plain text versions of the multiple aspects of the text, such as the main text and side text of both Hailey and Sam.

Prior to the start of class on Monday 2/8, I had no idea either of these tools existed, so obviously I needed a crash course on how to use them. Once they were explained and I got to mess around with them a little, they were relatively easy to use. Along with being easy to use, these resources are pretty interesting and helpful in further understanding a text, especially one as complex as Only Revolutions.

As you can see above, for my examination, I chose to use the side plain text files for Hailey and Sam. I found the history and timeline of the book to be one of the most interesting components. I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve been history and past events since I was younger so that might have something to do with it. Also, I kind of got the feeling that most everyone else would focus on the main text portions, so I wanted to do something different.

First, I wanted to look at the number of times the numbers 1-4 were used within the side text. Due to the interconnectedness of Hailey and Sam, I felt as though it would interesting to examine how they document the timeline of their stories with odd and even numbers. The numbers 1-4 were the most popular numbers used in the side text, which why I chose to solely focus on the those sets of odd and even numbers. Interestingly, for both sides of the story, they basically mirror each other on the graph for both the odds and evens. What I found to be even more intriguing was the number of times the numbers intersected. For both Hailey and Sam, the odd numbers intersected an odd amount of times (3). Contrarily, for the evens, Hailey’s 2 & 4 only intersected once at the very end and Sam’s evens intersected a total of 4 times. It would be interesting to see these number lines from the start of time of the novel (Sam’s start of timeline) to the end of time in the novel (2008 or so? in Hailey’s side).

In my second experiment, I wanted to see the most relevant words used in the side texts of the characters. As I expected, they are nearly identical. As of now, I don’t have an elaborate reasoning as to why this is significant other than it further shows Hailey and Sam’s connection throughout the novel despite the difference in time. I definitely there is something to be explained between the two experimentations I have done here, but now I just need to formulate it into a thesis and further develop it for my paper.

The use of these analytical tools allows readers to see and understand aspects of novels that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. I suppose you go actually take the time and go through the novel and find the things I have found, but that would take an immense amount of time and concentration. So another benefit of these tools is time and energy saving. Although, while these tools certainly help the reader find other interesting information about their novel, it is still up to the reader to find out the significance of these discoveries. So while we must be able to critically/closely read the actual novel itself, we must also applies those skills to the information we are given by these online resources.