Emily Dickinson: Fascicle 6

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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 11:15:35 AM EDT #poems1 #poems2 #poems3 #ce #LETTER #lSD #D #CP #fh #df6 #bm

How to Read the Network Analysis

In order to expand our analysis of how Emily Dickinson's poems in Fascicle 6 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 network analysis using different colored nodes and edges (circles and lines) with varying sizes.

To begin with, each node, or circle, represents a publication: "#df6" representing Dickinson's manuscript, "#ce" representing The Poems of Emily Dickinson; Centenary Edition, etc. To see which publication each node corresponds 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 get larger as you look clockwise around it, starting with "#bm" (or Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson) as the smallest node and ending with "#CP" (or The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson) as the largest node.

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 darker orange the edge is, the more variants the two nodes share, and the thicker and bluer 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, the two publications/versions, of the poems of Dickinson's Fascicle 6 that share the most variants with other publications/versions are Dickinson's original manuscripts ("#df6") and The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson ("#CP"). You can also see that Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson ("#bm") and Poems, Third Series ("#poems3") have the least number of variants shared. Bolts of Melody also only appears to have published one poem in Dickinson's Fascicle 6, Poem 4, so you can see that it only shares variants with The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and Dickinson's original poem. You can see as well that many of the publications share similar variants with the original Dickinson poems (seen by the yellow and green lines), but The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and The Poems of Emily Dickinson; Centenary Edition ("#ce") share more variants with the original poems than the others. Furthermore, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson shares the most variants with Dickinson's original poems, showing the least amount of change to the manuscripts and having published every poem in Fascicle 6.

It is also interesting to mention Dickinson's own variations of the poems, such as when variants are shared with letters that Dickinson wrote to Susan Dickinson and another letter she wrote, "#lSD" (Letter to Susan Dickinson) and "#LETTER" (Letter from Emily Dickinson). You can see that there is not a very good sense of shared variants, which is quite interesting! For example, in the poems that were also shared to Susan Dickinson in a letter, there were more commonly shared variants between the poem in the letter and Poems, Second Series ("#poems2") than shared variants with the original manuscripts. This seems a bit odd because all of the editions of Poems do not share very many variants with the original Dickinson manuscripts. Also, in the Letter from Emily Dickinson we can see that it has more shared variants with Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems ("#fh") than with the original manuscript.

In conclusion, you can see that all of the publications share variants with Dickinson's original manuscripts, but The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and The Poems of Emily Dickinson; Centenary Edition have the most shared variants. You can also see that Dickinson varied her poems as well. We see this variation with how the Letter to Susan Dickinson shares more variants with Poems, Second Series and with how Letter from Emily Dickinson shares more variants with Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems.