This map tracks the travels of Mark Twain through his speeches, adding life and speech contexts to create a clearer picture of his life. The darker the dots are, the older Twain is. The map has sections for the title of the speech, the location, the date, Twain’s age, and the words most commonly used in all of his available speeches from that year as retrieved through Voyant. I created the map with the theory that as Twain got older he would stay closer to New York, where I assumed he’d be living, and the words in his speeches would get more formal. This was more or less the case, with usages of prefixes such as “Mr.” becoming more common as time goes on.
To create this map I used the file “mark-twain-speeces.txt” as retrieved from Project Gutenberg for the overall corpus. I then used Voyant for word analysis and research articles such as the New England Historical Society‘s post “When Mark Twain Bombed Giving New England’s First Roast“, the Associated Press’ “Mark Twain House hopes for boost from 1879 fairy tale,” (Michael Melia, accessed through Yahoo News), “Marl Twain’s 1902 Trip to Missouri: A Reexamination, A Chronology, and an Annotated Bibliography,” (from Mark Twain Journal Vol. 38, No. 1, by Joe B. Fulton), “Mark Twain (Harbor boat, 1902-1907)” from Digital Public Library of America, and the dreaded Wikipedia in combination with blurbs from the Gutenberg corpus to add life context to the speeches.
To format the data, I combed through the corpus to find speeches with both date and location descriptors to use on the map. I then added these parameters to a Google Sheet. Originally, I was going to add the entirety of the speech in a section called “text” as well, but I realized it might be more interesting to add the most common words in speeches from that year instead. I created corpuses of speeches from each year, which allowed me to include more data as I wasn’t bound to speeches that had an assigned location. I then fed each corpus through Voyant and added that data to the Google Sheet. Finally, I downloaded the Google Sheet as a .csv and uploaded it to ArcGIS to create a map. Finally, I moved some points that uploaded incorrectly to a more accurate location and color coded each point to each year, with later years being a darker color.
I think that this map could be a good way to trace the path of Twain’s life. For example, one can see that Twain likely moved from New York to Europe and back at some point judging by the distribution of speeches. With further research, we can glean that this was due to him being in a large amount of debt in the United States.
The map tells us a lot about Twain’s life, and the word distribution tells us a lot about how his style continued to mature.
I think it would have been helpful to have an even larger corpus with speeches that go even earlier than 1872. Analyzing their location and word distribution would be an interesting way to widen the horizon this map creates.
