Text analysis
Jump to: Basic statistics | Demographic statistics | Sentiment and narrative shape
The digital edition of The Bow in the Cloud has rendered this 408-page printed anthology, and 30 unpublished manuscripts, into machine-readable XML data that can be used for various analytical purposes.
Some of the following statistics derive from an analysis of a corrected plain text (txt) file of the printed book. Other statistics come from XML source data of the individual pieces themselves as well as the personography data (rendered in People mentioned)
Basic statistics
The published anthology is roughly 73,000 total words, with 9,917 unique word forms.Vocabulary Density: 0.135
Readability Index: 10.340
Average Words Per Sentence: 25.1
Below is a searchable table of the most frequent words (not including stop words).
Access the full Voyant visualisation below to explore the printed book yourself.
Demographic statistics
The published anthology features 59 writers. As the People Mentioned page shows, all but four authors (A. H. Smith, J. R., Elizabeth Jones and one is anonymous and could not be identified) could be positively identified.In some cases, the anthology did not explicitly name the author of a piece but they have been identified through the analysis of their manuscripts. One of the tasks of curating this data was to undo the evident patriarchal elements of the book. The most prominent example is the Preface, which was authored by Mary Anne Rawson (she is not named anywhere in the book). Other examples: 'The Slave Ship', by 'S.', was written by Mary Sterndale; 'The Martyred Missionary's Grave', by 'T. R. T.', was written by Thomas Rawson Taylor; 'The Lot of the Slave', by 'R. C–––l', was written by Richard Cecil; and 'The Hope of the Slave', by 'E.', was written by Elizabeth Walker. One important feature too is that authors' names are made consistent in the edition: for example, in the book Miss Dinah Ball is also Dinah Townley (Dinah Ball married James Townley while the book was being compiled); 'Mrs. Josiah Conder' is labelled Eliza Conder; 'Mrs. Henry Walker' is Elizabeth Walker.
Of the 59 writers, 43 could be identified as male authors and 14 female.
The religious affiliations are interesting: 14 authors were Congregationalists (which is not surprising because the editor Mary Anne Rawson was a Congregationalist); 14 Anglicans (many of whom were evangelicals, but some were not); 4 Methodists; 4 Baptists; 3 Unitarians; 2 Presbyterians; 1 Moravian; and 1 Spiritualist (or Swedenborgian).
| Congregationalist | 14 |
| Anglican | 14 |
| Quaker | 8 |
| Methodist | 4 |
| Baptist | 4 |
| Unitarian | 3 |
| Presbyterian | 2 |
| Moravian | 1 |
| Spiritualist | 1 |
Religious affiliations were determined through biographical analysis and secondary sources that could positively identify religious affiliations. Admittedly, this is a difficult designation. In some (unambiguous) cases, authors were open about their affiliation and some were employed within a particular church. In other cases, religious affiliations could be inferred through baptism records, burial records, and associations with a particular milieu. It is also impossible in some cases to ascertain whether religious feeling was strong or whether it was merely social. While these latter cases may seem tenuous, it is still worthwhile to consider how the religious context of a writer may have affected their views and rhetoric on slavery.
Sentiment and narrative shape
Scholars may wonder what kind of narrative shape and sentiment value may be applied to this book. As a 'commemoration', does the book show a kind of narrative arc? According to raw sentiment scores, the book does indeed show a 'happy ending', with a dark middle-period.These sentiment results were generated from the syuzhet package in R, developed by Matthew Jockers. The syuzhet algorithm assigns sentiment values to each sentence (which is supposed to account for the general sentiment of the whole context of an utterance, rather than a single word or two-word pair). These scores are plotted in the graphs above, with 'rolling mean' graph smoothing out the results of the raw data.
The overall sentiment score of the published book is -89.95. This is lower than two other prominent narratives of slavery from this era, Mary Prince's (-96.3) and Ouladah Equiano's (-120.25). The narrative shape of the Rawson's anthology is also different than Prince and Equiano's.
