Oedipus The King

Oedipus The King http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/oedipus.html



For this text analysis assignment, “Oedipus The King” which is a play written by Sophocles. I was familiar with the “Oedipus Complex” created by Sigmund Freud which I learned about in a psychology course that I took last year. The complex states men secretly want to murder their fathers and have sex with their mothers because they men goes through a process of a “castration anxiety” As a result men marry women who resemble their mothers.

This play is based on this complex. During the time that Sophocles wrote this play, the people that watched it had prior knowledge of this. This year in my theatre class, I read the play as well. From a young age Oedipus and his parents Jocasta and Laius learned about the prophecy which states that Qedipus will kill his father in order to become king, and marry his mother and have children. Jocasta and Laius were determined to manipulate the prophecy; therefore they attempted to murder their son, but unfortunately the messenger did nott follow the instructions and gave the son Oedipus to another family. As a result, the prophecy is fulfilled. Jocasta commits suicide, and Oedipus goes into exile.

Sophocles wrote many of his plays between the period of 496-406 BC. During this period only men performed theatre, and would take the multiple roles of male and female characters. This challenges the idea of whether humans have free will or if there is a greater god which controls our destiny.

From the knowledge that I have gained from the text in the play, I have decided to perform a text analyses on this. Some of the basic information on this play include:

Play Title: Oedipus the King
Playwright: Sophocles
Language: English
Translation: F.Storr
Setting: Thebes
Character:s: Qedipus, Priest of Zeus, Jocasta, Creon, Tiresias, Chorus of Theban Elders, Messenger, Herd of Laius.
Media Type: Translated Text in English
Links: Home page, Search Tool, Browse and Commentary, Help Tool, and Purchasing of DVD’s and CD Roms.

On this page only part of the text is available, but there is a link to download the full text.

The basic function for this particular webpage is for people to read the play and obtain a better understanding whether it is for a class or personal interest. On the main page of the website, people are able to access different Greek and Roman literature. Each writing is translated into English. One can search for the author of a play or story as well as different themes to find one that pertains to one’s curiosity.

One form of analysis that I used was the Wordle. If an individual does not know about the text, the wordle can give a sense of of stories by looking at the pronouns, nouns, adjective, verbs, and adverbs. The wordle calculates the word usage and word frequency. The words in the largest font are the names of the characters within the play. The words surrounding the characters are the adjectives that describe the characters such as Oedipus being the king, the lord, fear from the prophecy, murderer from the Oedipus killing his own father, and the blood from Jocasta’s suicide. The verbs include seek, which refers to the prophecy, and speak from when the characters interact with one another. Many of the nouns include words such as thee, thou, art, ye, and thine. These words give a sense of how the translation is written in Old English, meaning that a person will obtain a time frame of when the play was written. I utilized the many either website and decided to create a word tree as well. Due to the fact that this play is a piece of literature, I felt that a word tree would be useful this calculates word frequency and connects the most commonly used with the use of different contexts that the words is used. Oedipus was the most commonly used word in the text; therefore most of the words are connected to what he says, does, or feels.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2610406/Oedipus_the_King

This is a link to my wordle. :)

Text Analyisis and Digital Tools

In today's lab we took a look at different types of text analysis and digital tools. I was a part of Team Starbuck, and we took a look at the New York Times Visualization Lab and how this website can be used as a source for text analysis.

The New York Times Visualization website is a program that allows people to use various forms of analysis. The type of data you can use to analyze using the tools available consists of the New York Times articles because this website strictly looks at these articles and provides different forms of digital tools.The information that one can extract from the data include word frequency, word counts, word consistency, word associations, maps, charts, graphs, and a summary of statistics. The website permits users to upload files to submit different types of text analysis that the users created. One question that was drawn to the group's attention immediately was why only certain types of tools come up for certain pages and not others.

This website was fairly simple for any person to utilize, although I found that I have to play around with the website. The population that is interested in the New York Times magazine can access this visualization page to gather and retain more information about the articles that are present in the magazine. Students that are researching an article can utlize this website for a better or simpler understanding of the article. The website might also be used by scholars and professors, people with an interest in literature or pop culture, historians, geographers,or it can be viewed for fun. It is a good visualization source and it is easy to comprehend the information given. If an individual was unaware of the articles in the magazines, that individual would not have a difficult time following through the website, but it would be simpler to find an article that appeals to one's interest. The website also includes the full articles with the analytical and digital tools. Unfortunately, depending upon the type or article one chooses to ake a close look at, only particular forms of text analysis will be available.

An example of this would be the article referring to Barack Obama's inaugaration speech. Due to the fact that there were not any statistics noted in his speech, charts, graphs and maps were not the forms of text analysis used. Instead word clouds and word trees were used. These forms measured word frequency, word association, and word trends. In some of the files that users created, one can narrow down the search by specifically looking for a sections or word and finding all of the phrases related to the word. The reason that we chose this article as appose to others is due to our common interest, and that fact that it was an article that the group could recognize in terms of the person it was related to.

One point that I remembered was the fact that the number of analytical and digital tools were created by other users and maybe an individual ad a difficult time finding a different way to display other forms of text analysis or the person is creatively searching for a method to make all types of analysis be accessible for any text.On the website there were other articles where the analytical and digital tools were mainly statistics, and graphs. Some had a combination of both, but there was a lack of continuity. Each type of tool device can be useful depending upon what an individual is looking for or depending on the type of article it is. In terms of the Obama reading the I found that the word tree was the most useful, because it displayed different word variations, allowed a user to narrow down the search to a particular section of the article, and one can focus on the main phrases or points of the article.