About the Textual Analysis
Methods
Following review of the project during the Fall 2018 semester, it became clear that timeline which had formed the core of the project since its inception was not producing as much data and information as originally hoped for. After investigating several other possible avenues of expansion for the project—including but not limited to alternate timeline software, textual comparisons of different versions of the two texts, TEI encoding as a form of structural analysis, and more—I settled on engaging in a textual analysis through various distant reading tools. To this end, I needed to create multiple corpora based upon Lovecraft’s published work. After some research I located nearly complete library of his works online. These digital copies are hosted and maintained by HPLovecraft.Com, a website dedicated to preserving and sharing information about the life and works of Lovecraft. The website is maintained by Donovan K. Loucks, but the texts and information on the site was contributed by Loucks, David E. Schultz—a Lovecraft scholar and editor of numerous collections of Lovecraft’s fiction and letters—and S.T. Joshi. To ascertain the provenance of the texts, I contact Mr. Loucks, who informed me the texts are based upon S.T. Joshi’s corrected versions, with other minor retouching by Mr. Loucks to fix minor errors that occurred in the transcribing process.
With their provenance confirmed to my satisfaction, I then began copying each story and compiling my corpus. Along the way, I made a few changes. I chose to not include the “Discarded Draft to A Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and further split “The Mysterious Ship” into two texts to better represent the differences between the “Long” and “Short” versions. I also chose to omit “The Thing in the Moonlight” due to formatting issues brought about by the two column publication, and also due to the text including the expanded story and the letter which it was based upon. As a result of these changes, my base corpus ultimately consisted of 100 texts, and 703315 words.
However, to properly engage in textual analysis of both of the stories chosen for my timeline, “Call of Cthulhu” and “The Temple,” it was necessary to create two other corpora, one without each story. This allowed for better textual analysis and highlight how each story differs from the rest of Lovecraft’s corpus. Furthermore, due to limitations with the topic modeling software, I was forced to create another version of the corpus, but with each text renamed to remove their publication dates from file names.
Data
The corpus used in for the Textual Analysis was created using the digital versions of H.P. Lovecraft's prose works currently available at The H.P. Lovecraft Archive.