A Visual Text Analysis of Meditations
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Introduction
For my midterm project, I chose to analyze the text of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and visualize the data. Meditations is a journal of a Roman emperor who documented his thoughts. Over the years, it has become a handbook for Stoicism. In this project, I wanted to highlight the different themes of this book to get a better understanding of his personal philosophy. To create a bar chart race of the top ten words in his book, I used Voyant Tools to analyze the text and Flourish to present the data.
Sources, Process, and Presentation
The source I used was the online eBook of Meditations on Project Gutenberg. Then, I had to find the top ten words for each chapter. To do this, I went into the HTML file on VS Code to edit the text. First, I got rid of any additional text Project Gutenberg added that was not related to the book. Then, I split the file twelve times, one for each book/chapter. Then I imported the 12 documents into Voyant Tools. I found that I had to get rid of a lot of stop words that weren’t automatically included in the list. Since this is an ancient text, I had to clean up a lot of words like “hast” and “shall.” After I cleaned up the words, I made a new dataset on Google Sheets to document the top ten words per chapter. After the dataset was finished, I imported it into Flourish to display the bar chart race.
Initially, it didn’t display as well as I would have thought. There were still two words that were overpowering the rest: “things” and “man.” Marcus Aurelius uses the word “things” to describe external events that are outside one’s control. He uses the word “man” to discuss human nature and how people should act rationally and with virtue. However, these words were used very broadly. To balance out the graph, I made the choice to omit these words so that other themes could be highlighted. This graph isn’t only an analysis of Marcus Aurelius’s writing style, but about the themes of Stoicism. Another change I made to the data was accumulating it. Instead of restarting the visualization every chapter, the chart now told a more complete story.
Flourish has a lot of customizability options to explore. I went through its settings one by one to make some visual edits to enhance the presentation. To highlight the themes, I made 4 different categories of words and color-coded them. Paired with a gray background, the colors really stood out. This helped me analyze the themes of Stoicism and see which ones were most prominent throughout his book.
Significance
This data visualization shows how the book evolves from chapter to chapter. It is useful to gauge a general understanding of the themes and key words of Marcus Aurelius’s Stoic philosophy. Looking at this graph, it is clearly inferred that “nature” and “ethics” are the two biggest themes throughout the book. However, the results are not set in stone. Just because the word “nature” appears more times than any other word does not mean the category it’s in is the most prominent theme. Also, the categories are very broad. Categories like rational thinking and acceptance of external events are grouped imperfectly into ethics and nature respectively. This means that the themes that are being exposed to the audience are quite limited. In conclusion, this chart is meant to be an introductory overview of the contents of Meditations, not an in-depth analysis.
