For this distant reading assignment I decided to analyze the Beatles first album( Please Please me) compared to their last album together(Abbey Road). The Beatles have always been of interest to me. I think that it is fascinating to think about when they first became famous and all looked the same, sang cute little songs, were clean faced, and had a very pure image. Their songs were very innocent and mostly about love. Some of their most popular earlier songs include, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, “Love Me Do”, and “Twist and Shout”. This is a reflection of the times. Their first album debuted in 1963, right after the 50’s which was a time of innocence and music about romance with “do wops” and harmonies. The last album the Beatles made together, Abbey Road, debuted in in 1969. This album was drastically different from their first album. It featured odd songs such as “Octopus’s Garden”, “Mean Mr.Mustard”, and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. The Beatles had changed so much by the time of their last album. This is probably because of how much the world had changed. It was right in the middle of the Vietnam War, young adults all across the country were protesting, it was the time of the hippies and free love. Drugs were being used in record numbers. These themes all inspired the bands music substantially. By the time of their last album they had changed dramatically. They had long scraggly hair, beards, did lots of drugs, and were by all accounts, hippies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Au_QW5MJNI – Love Me Do
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De1LCQvbqV4 – Octopus’s Garden
To analyze the differences in their music through out the years I will be using distant reading. Distant reading is an unusual and controversial way of analyzing literature. This method created by Franco Moretti, approaches literature in a scientific and mathematical way. You just insert the test into a distant reading processor such as Voyant tools or Voyeur to examine the data. The system will give you a lot of information such as word counts, word clouds, graphs, and word correlations. It is a good way to read a text or at least get the gist of it with out having to read the entire thing.
To analyze the change in their music, I submitted all of the lyrics from their first album and all the lyrics from the last album into the distant reading to see the difference. For the first album, I looked mostly at the word cloud shown below. As I assumed, the most common word used is “love”. The word love is sang in their songs 73 times through out the album. Some of the other most common words used are , yeah, baby, la, whoa, oh, and boys. All of these commonly used words are phrases you would expect to hear in songs from the 1950’s accompanying a song. Another interesting piece of data from the Voyant analysis is the correlation of the word “twist” and “shout”. There is a .936 correlation between the two terms. This means that they are very in sync with each other. Additionally they also have a significance of .000069 which means that this correlation is extremely significant. This makes a lot of sense considering on of the songs in the album is “Twist and Shout”.
https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=1a31e71350aa000249e75c585348a81c
Next I wanted to analyze The Beatles final album, Abbey Road. Something that was very interesting to me was that “love” was again the most common word used. However, it was only used 33 times compared to the 73 times it was mentioned in the first album. By looking at the other words in the word cloud, it is interesting to note that their are no filler words such as la, woah, or oh. Also their seems to be many more odd words such as octopus’s, sun, garden, and weight. Words that would not be expected to see commonly in a song. This is something that I expected to see due to the change in times and the evolution of music.
https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=d80ad7f19f59e09fb39cfff8dbc3117e
The insights that can be gained from using distant reading really helped me to better understand the evolution of The Beatles music. This qualifies as a digital humanities project because it is taking pieces of literature and in this case music and digitizing it. Burdick describe the digital humanities as
“Every migration from analog to digital is a translation that stages a certain experience of artifacts encountered online” (102). This website is taking analog information and turning into a digital platform where people can analyze the results of the computations found. He also mentions that
“Phrases like ‘distant reading,’ ‘content modeling,’ or ‘knowledge representation’ will become just as familiar a part of our vocabulary as the terms ‘social media’ and ‘networking’ have” (106) Right now, the common person does not know what distant reading is but in the next few years it will be much more common.
Hurricane: A Storm of Digital Humanities 