Lab Session: Digital Humanities

In this blog, I am going to share my experiences of working with three digital tools and my learning outcomes. This activity was assigned by Dilip Barad Sir as part of our Digital Humanities lab session.Click Here

1. Human or Computer? – Poem Test

                                  

We began the lab with a simple but fascinating challenge: Can machines really write poetry? We were given a poem and had to guess whether it was written by a human or generated by a computer.

This made me reflect on the subtle differences between human creativity and artificial generation. While machines can imitate rhyme, rhythm, and structure quite well, they often lack the emotional depth and unique intuition that human writers bring to their work. This activity reminded me that creativity is not just about putting words together but also about expressing lived experiences and feelings.

2. CLiC Dickens Project & Activity Book

For the second activity,we were divided into groups by our professor Dilip Barad sir,in our group Bhargav Makwana, Bhumi Mahida and Me. we explored Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield using the CLiC Concordance Tool. The focus was on the character Mr. Dick, and we worked step by step through the following activities:

Activity 8.1 – We searched for every occurrence of “Dick.” Many results showed Mr. Dick as a receiver of actions rather than the one performing them, which hinted at his limited agency in the novel.

Patterns in Verbs and PositionLack of agency –

Mr. Dick is often placed in positions where he is not the doer but the one being referred to.

Example: “give my compliments to Mr. Dick,” or “said Mr. Dick, feebly scratching his head.”

Recipient of action or comment –

Frequently appears after verbs spoken by others (e.g., “said my aunt, ‘you have heard me mention David Copperfield,’ Mr. Dick…”).

His role is often passive, being spoken to, sent for, or looked at.

Weak agentive verbs –

When he does act, the verbs are minor or hesitant: “leaning,” “linger,” “scratching his head.”These suggest uncertainty, weakness, or lack of decisive action.

Cognitive or perceptual verbs –

His strongest verbs show thinking or observing: “he thought,” “anxiously watched,” “considering, and looking vacantly.”This emphasizes his role as someone who perceives and reflects rather than materially influences events.

Oddities

Often defined through others’ perception – his aunt or David frequently “frame” him by commenting on him.Repetitive phrasing – His name is often repeated in full (Mr. Dick) rather than using pronouns, which might add to his comic or peculiar portrayal.Contradiction between presence and action – He appears frequently in conversations, yet contributes little that moves the plot forward.

Activity 8.2 – By filtering for non-quotes, we observed how the narrator describes Mr. Dick compared to how others speak about him. This highlighted how narrative voice shapes our understanding of his character.

Activity 2 Picking out the characterisation

What stands out is that many of these lines reduce his presence to formulaic reporting clauses such as “said Mr. Dick” or “Mr. Dick looked”. These repeated reporting structures limit the variety of his portrayal and make him seem less dynamic than other characters. When description does expand, it still tends to highlight his passivity or eccentricity: he is shown “scratching his head,” “looking vacantly,” or “laying down his pen.” These are minor, hesitant actions rather than decisive or plot-driving ones.

Taken together, these examples reinforce the impression that Mr. Dick’s role in the novel is more about being observed, spoken about, or gently ridiculed than about performing significant actions. His presence is marked by repetition, simple reporting clauses, and weak verbs, all of which underline his reflective, passive, and somewhat comic characterisation.

Activity 8.3 – Here, we focused on reporting clauses such as “said Mr. Dick.” It showed that much of his presence in the text is tied to dialogue and how other characters respond to his words.

Activity 8.4 – We examined long suspensions, moments when Dickens interrupts dialogue with description (e.g., body language or emotions). These interruptions revealed Mr. Dick’s mental states, expressions, and the narrator’s careful attention to his behavior.

Activity 8.5 – Face and Features of the Character

Finally, we refined our search using words like head, face, eyes, mouth, looked, watched, seemed. This helped us trace how Dickens repeatedly draws attention to Mr. Dick’s physical features, especially his facial expressions. By doing so, Dickens emphasizes both his vulnerability and his human depth. This activity showed how even small textual details—like recurring mentions of the face or eyes—play a big role in character construction.

Altogether, the CLiC activities made me realize how digital tools can reveal hidden patterns in a literary text, patterns that may remain unnoticed in a traditional close reading.

In this image i found Head word in novel.

In this image i search Eyes word i found only 3 result for this word.

I also try synonyms for eyes but i can't find any synonym .

3. Voyant Tools

The final activity introduced us to Voyant Tools, an online text analysis platform. With it, I experimented with word clouds, frequency graphs, and trend visualizations. For example, the Bubble tool made it easy to identify which words dominated the text, and the trends graph helped track recurring themes across passages.

Using Voyant made literary analysis more interactive and visually appealing. It showed me that digital methods don’t replace critical reading but rather enhance it by providing new perspectives.

                                      

Trends Graph: 

The Trends tool in Voyant is used to display the distribution of terms across a corpus or single text.

This graph shows that key terms like man, life, eyes, father, shall appear unevenly but significantly across the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, reflecting its themes of creation, humanity, vision, and responsibility.

Colored lines (Words):

shall (orange) – fluctuates, but appears in waves across the text (not dominant but persistent).

man (blue) – very frequent, peaks in segment 5, showing thematic importance in the middle of the novel.

life (pink) – scattered evenly, but slightly stronger in the early and mid-segments.

father (cyan) – appears consistently, with spikes in segment 3 and 9, reflecting family/parental themes.

eyes (green) – rises and falls dramatically, peaking in segments 2, 6, and 10, highlighting its recurring symbolic role (perception, recognition, horror).

Learning outcome:

Through these three activities, I gained valuable insights into how Digital Humanities combines technology with literature,Together, these tasks enhanced my critical reading, digital literacy, and analytical thinking. More importantly, they helped me see that literature is not only about interpretation but also about exploring patterns, forms, and meanings in innovative ways.