Textual Analysis: Voyant Summary Tool
To begin my analysis, I examined Lovecraft’s entire corpus through Voyant. I began with the Summary tool which provides several different categories of information—document length, vocabulary density, and words per sentence about the entire corpus in a bulleted list. At Voyant’s default setting, several of these lists only display the information of the top five items, and neither of my chosen proved to be notable in any of the categories. It was only after I broadened the item range to twenty-five that “Call of Cthulhu” appeared in both the Document Length and Vocabulary Density sections of the tool. While its position as the fifteenth longest story isn’t terribly illuminating, though it does serve to suggest why it often serves as a centerpiece for various collections, its position at number twenty-one among the lower vocabulary densities is more illuminating, particularly when placed in context with the timeline data.
Summary Tool: "The Call of Cthulhu"
Originally published in 1928, “Call of Cthulhu” sits at the beginning of an eight-year period which saw Lovecraft produce several of his better known works. Following its publication, Lovecraft would go on to release works such as “The Dunwich Horror” (1929) “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931), “The Dreams in Witch House” (1933), “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1936) and “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936). While the exact publication history of those stories is currently beyond the scope of this project, it is worth noting that many of them appear among Voyant’s list of his longest works, and those with the lowest vocabulary density—a ratio comparing the number of words in a document against the unique words in the document, a higher score is an indication of textual complexity and the frequency of new or unique words. This not only suggests the possibility that longer works naturally tend to have a lower vocabulary density, but it also suggests that one of the key traits commonly associated with Lovecraft’s work—his large and purple vocabulary and prose—had a smaller presence during his foray into longer works.
In an attempt to confirm this theory, I isolated all the texts published between 1927-1937 and examined them through Voyant. The Summary tool immediately confirmed it, as there was a clear correlation between the longest texts from this period and the lowest vocabulary density. This suggests Lovecraft’s longer works either lessened the impact of his notably purpose prose, whether this was through repetition or because it was hidden amongst less purple terminology is unknown.
Summary Tool: "The Temple"
With regards to “The Temple”, its absence from either the the Document Length or Vocabulary Density lists, even after expanding them to include the top 25 results and despite being published only three years before, suggests that it lacks these notable textual features that are prominent within his better known works, and is a possible reason for its shorter publication history.