[Closed Captions]
Along with manuscript pages, audio recordings, and other archival materials,
Digital Yoknapatawpha allows users to
visualize the stories a number of different ways.
These visualizations are available under the menu tab "visualizations."
One interesting visualization for "A Rose for Emily," is the Character-Character Force
Directed graph. Clicking the specific visualization brings you to its main interface.
this consists of an "About" page with a detailed explanation,
a "Demo" video with an in-depth demonstration, and a faceted search that lets
users filter out specific aspects of the story.
We can generate a graph of a story by selecting it from the drop down menu and
clicking search.
Sometimes these graphs can be very large, and it is useful to zoom in to focus on a
particular area, or zoom out to see everything.
The graph can also be locked into place by freezing it,
and individual characters referred to as nodes can be clicked to show
their connections with other nodes. While the "About" page and "Demo"
offer more precise explanations of how these types of graphs work,
for simplicity's sake we can say that they show a character's centrality,
and the frequency of connections between characters.
Characters who occur or are mentioned often with other characters,
are placed closer to the center of the graph. Like Emily here
The amount of times they occur with specific characters is measured by the thickness
lines between the two nodes. Not surprisingly,
Emily has the thickest lines with the three major men in her life: her father,
Homer Barron
and Tobe.
These graphs can be used for getting a basic sense of the social networks in the story.
For example, if we filter the characters by class and set it to "Upper Class" or "Middle Class"
we notice that both groups have a number of characters who are connected with one another.
If we set it to "Lower Class," only one character appears, Homer Barron.
The chart underscores just how different Homer is from other people in the story.
He and Emily are on opposite ends of the social spectrum.
Another curious phenomenon in Emily's social world is just how connected she is to other people.
She lives as a recluse most of her life, and yet she has many connections with other characters.
Although more isolated her existence is rarely private, and various people
in town busy themselves with her life. By taking these two observations together,
the social chasm between Homer and Emily and her lack of privacy,
we can consider just how guarded and surveilled a single woman was during this period.
First, her father kept her trapped inside the house because no man was good enough for her,
and then, when he died,
the townspeople and her extended kin took over his role, and tried to prevent her from
having a relationship with Homer Barron.
We may wonder to what extent this intense social pressure on a woman to act a certain
way was, in part, a motivation for the story's lugubrious ending.
A nice feature of the graphs is that they can be exported.
This useful for saving the different charts for comparison
or integrating them into a written analysis, like an essay.