Hunter Ubersox 9/13/14 English 1102 Dr.Higinbotham Shakespeare Data Mining Assignment: Twelfth Night
In his comedy Twelfth Night, Shakespeare highlights the rampant flexibility of identity, desire,
and use of language throughout the play’s character interactions. More specifically, he emphasizes a
strong contrast between the situations and romantic attitudes of the play’s two main females: Olivia and
Viola. Looking at the above word map depicting the most common words in the entire work, “house”,
“love”, and “know” stand out particularly prominently as buzzwords pointing to this theme. The grand
majority of the play’s characters have established homes during the play’s timeframe, yet Viola (and
Sebastian too) stands alone in limbo due to her status as recently shipwrecked. Viola is also unique for
maintaining the same love interest throughout the entire course of the play and successfully fulfilling her
desire in marriage. In contrast, Olivia changes her romantic desire from refusing to love anyone to loving
Cesario (Viola) to marrying Sebastian in the end. However, unlike Viola, Olivia has a well-established
home as a prominent noblewoman in Illyria. Further evidence pointing to the striking contrast between
Olivia’s established home but fluctuating love interest and Viola’s romantic dedication but tenuous
position in the world can be easily seen though closer inspection of the text.
Hunter Ubersox 9/13/14 English 1102 Dr.Higinbotham Viola uses the word ‘house’ a total of seven times, earning it a recognizable position on the above
word map of all of her lines throughout the play. However, when investigating the actual instances in
which the uses the word, it becomes readily apparent that she never refers back to having a true place
where she belongs in the world. Once, she even uses ‘house’ in a purposefully-ambiguous manner “I am
all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too” to throw off Orsino as to her origins
(2.4.132-134). Additionally, she uses the word ‘house’ four times to refer back to Olivia’s domain,
further emphasizing the fact that Viola has no where she truly belongs in the world during the majority
of the play’s duration.
Hunter Ubersox 9/13/14 English 1102 Dr.Higinbotham In ironic contrast, Olivia only uses the word ‘house’ two times throughout the play, causing it to
be particularly absent from Olivia’s word cloud. However, both times Olivia is referring back to her own
domain through its usage. Thus while Shakespeare flips the number of times each female lead says the
word ‘house’, he makes the contrast between their positions in the world exceedingly poignant through
its usage.
Hunter Ubersox 9/13/14 English 1102 Dr.Higinbotham When considering each character’s romantic intentions, Olivia uses the word ‘love’ a significant
total of 9 times, emphasizing that romantic interests are particularly high on her priority list. However,
the love interest she refers to changes on several occasions throughout the play. For example, at the
beginning of the play, Olivia repeats how she cannot love anybody at the moment, especially Orsino,
with her brother’s death so fresh in her mind. Yet, she quickly falls in love with Cesario (Viola) as he
repeatedly delivers her messages of Orsino’s love. It is even more striking that Olivia never outright says
that she loves Sebastian but marries him almost on the spot by romantic impulse. As a result, Olivia’s
fickle nature becomes readily apparent to the audience as everyone wonders who she’ll grow attached to
next.
Hunter Ubersox 9/13/14 English 1102 Dr.Higinbotham Viola refers to ‘love’ a whopping twenty-three times during the duration of the play, farsurpassing Olivia and proving that Viola is even further entrenched in the play’s comedic romantic
triangle. Although Viola (as Cesario) is tasked with the objective of convincing Olivia of Orsino’s love
as his messenger, Viola remains steadfast in her devotion and affection for Orsino. Unlike Olivia, her
romantic interest never changes throughout the entirety of the play, aided by her cross-dressing act as
Cesario and her true dedication to Orsino.
Hunter Ubersox 9/13/14 English 1102 Dr.Higinbotham To further highlight this constant and consistent adoration, Viola only says the word ‘wife’ twice
throughout the play, once very near both the beginning and end. Each time, she is referring to her desire
to be Orsino’s wife. Thus, Shakespeare really drives home the point that while Olivia may have a
constant place in the world, her romantic interests fluctuate as rapidly as Viola’s identity changes
throughout the course of the play. Though Viola’s romantic interests remain constant, both contrasting
lead female characters firmly support Shakespeare’s emphasis on flexible identity and desire in Twelfth
Night.
Hunter Ubersox 9/13/14 English 1102 Dr.Higinbotham Shakespeare Twelfth Night Data Mining-Reflection
The Shakespeare Data Mining assignment turned out to be strikingly different from
anything else I have ever done, as Voyant proved to be a particularly powerful but sometimes
quirky tool. The main intellectual goal of this assignment was to further investigate Shakespeare
by stepping back from a literature class’s close textual analysis in order to see the big picture and
the overarching trends with how Shakespeare uses language to construct his plays. In this sense,
it was always interesting to discover the contrast between the ways and frequency with which
each character used a few key words. These goals and my project’s focus directly connect to the
course’s main theme of determining the ethics of the authenticity of social interactions. This
assignment in particular centered on honing synthesis skills in which one must know which data
to search for in order to bolster their point or argument about the text. My purpose in this datamining assignment was to highlight the changing differences of identity and desire between
Twelfth Night’s two main female characters: Olivia and Viola. After the initial word cloud of the
entire text to establish the key terms of ‘love’, ‘house’, and ‘know,’ I made my purpose
pervasive throughout the presentation of the assignment by highlighting key times in which each
character refers back to my chosen assignment theme. To appeal to my audience of other GT
students who may also be investigating Twelfth Night, I made sure to present my information
visually with several word clouds as well as word counts and highlighted key text. Voyant is an
extremely powerful tool, but it does require a firm process of research for one to successfully
take full advantage of it. For example, one must always use the stop-words filter upon both the
word cloud and word count after inputting each next section of text. Although Shakespeare is
typically packed with original or uncommon words, Voyant proved to be an almost-perfect tool
for this assignment as careful planning resulted in what I believe to be a well-focused
presentation of my argument. Looking back, one of the only things I would change about my
Hunter Ubersox 9/13/14 English 1102 Dr.Higinbotham completion of this assignment is my lack of using a word tree for it would have made it easier for
my audience to determine the phrases in Shakespeare supporting my argument. However, at the
time I completed the assignment, Many Eyes refused to load its visualization on my computer for
some reason. Nevertheless, I am still quite pleased with how my argument developed through the
use of Voyant over the course of completing this assignment.