Malamud at Oregon State: A Digital Humanities Project

Interactions By Character

These visualizations focus on particular types of interactions and showing how their frequencies differ by character in direct contrast.

A fascinating trend of information giving is that characters appear to have sinusoidal oscillations in the quantities of information they offer. These trends are specific character by character, but when viewed in concert some overall shapes appear as well. Perhaps this is a visualization of the book's internal/external moments for Levin.

This graph manifests a different pattern than the one above it; interactions appear flat except for wild spikes that pervade the novel.

Between Levin, Gilley, Pauline, and Fabrikant, Levin clearly dominates in the obfuscation department. Though the other characters each have their moments of vulnerability, only Levin consistently feels the need to so blatantly hide information.

Of the three non-Levin characters analyzed here, Pauline leads the charge in asking for actions (primarily of Levin). Pauline's requests flood the beginning and end of the novel (which makes sense, given that they tend to either create characterization or further the plot).

When it comes to obeying requests, Levin is by far the most common character to take part. Besides that, the most noticeable anomaly is the block of obeying actions associated with Pauline in the midpoint of the novel.

The trends of this graph tend to fall in line with those of the graph above. There are some character-by-character differences, however: Gilley, for example, tends to refuse requests from Levin more than he obeys them. Meanwhile Pauline tends to obey requests from Levin more than she refuses them.

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