Emily Dickinson: Fascicle 16

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Sharing of Variants Network Analysis

Creator: FreeHEP Graphics2D Driver Producer: org.freehep.graphicsio.svg.SVGGraphics2D Revision Source: Date: Friday, April 29, 2016 12:09:48 PM EDT #poems3 #fh #ce #lSD #fp #poems2 #am #df16 #poems1 #bm

How to Read the Network Analysis

In order to expand our analysis of how Emily Dickinson's poems in Fascicle 16 change from publication to publication, our team decided to look closer to see how these variants are shared among all of the different versions of the poems. To show this sharing of variants in an organized way, we created a newtork analysis using different colored nodes and edges (circles and lines) with varying sizes.

To begin with, each node, or circle, represents a publication: "#df16" representing Dickinson's manuscript, "#ce" representing The Poems of Emily Dickinson; Centenary Edition, etc. To see which publication each node cooresponds to, see our GitHub Wiki for this section of the project. The size and the color of the node represent how many shared variants the publication has. The larger and bluer the node is, the more variants it shares with other publications. The smaller and more orange the node, the less variants it shares with other publications. The color ranges from blue to orange, meaning that green nodes have more shared variants, because they are closer to the blue color, than the yellow nodes, which are closer to the orange color. Our network is set up in a circle where the nodes are in no particular order.

As you can see in the network analysis, there is a line extending from each publication to each of the other pubications that it shares variants with, which means each node could potentially have ten lines extending from it to other nodes. These lines are called edges. Each edge represents all of the shared variations. We have bundled these variants together in this analysis because having an edge for each variant made the network very hard to read. Like the nodes, the color and size of the edges represent the number of variants each pair of publications share with each other. However, for the edges, the thinner and bluer the edge is, the more variants the two nodes share, and the thicker and darker orange the edge is, the lesser amount of variants the two nodes share. Again, since the colors of the edges range from orange to blue, the yellow edges show that the source node, or the primary publication, and target node, or the publication we are comparing the source node to, have more shared variants than the green edges, which show that there are slightly less shared variations between the two publications.

Network Analysis Conclusion

As you can see, there are three nodes that share the most variants in the poems of Fascicle 16, The Poems of Emily Dickinson; Centenary Edition ("#ce"), Dickinson's original manuscripts ("#df16"), and Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems ("#fh"). You can also see that Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson ("#bm"), the Letter to Susan Dickinson ("#lSD"), and Poems ("#poems1") have the least number of shared variants. This is because these publications/versions only appear to look at a few poems within the Fascicle. For example, Bolts of Melody has only published one poem, Poem 8, in the Fascicle, like in Fascicle 6, so you can see that it only shares variants with Dickinson's original manuscripts (and very few at that!).

Another interesting thing we can see in this network is Dickinson's own variations among versions of her poems. Look at the connection between "#df16" and "#lSD." You can see that "#ce" also shares variants with Dickinson's two variations. However, you can also see that "#ce" shares about half of "#lSD"s variants, and the other half are shared by "#df16." In this Fascicle, the only poem that Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to Susan Dickinson is Poem 11, so you can see much of the pronouns that Dickinson had used originally were changed in the letter.

In conclusion, you can see that all of the publications share variants with Dickinson's original manuscripts equally except Poems. You can also see that Dickinson varied her poems as well. We see this variation with how the Letter to Susan Dickinson shares about the same amount of variants with The Poems of Emily Dickinson; Centenary Edition.