Understanding the project.
This project is part of the academic seminar Envisioning non-human centred perspectives at KISD led by Katrin Müller. The inspiration for this project stemmed from imagery of a human-like bear in a Chinese zoo. This sparked a curiosity about anthropomorphic descriptions of animals in classic novels and their profound impact on our current understanding of animals. The project utilises data from classic novels available on Project Gutenberg and employs natural language processing for analysis. The objective is to identify interactions involving animals, such as them being talked about, certain interactions and save the surrounding sentences along with metadata in a database.
It is important to note that the automated analysis may not capture all paragraphs related to animals and may be influenced by synonyms or language complexities. The project aims to create a user-friendly platform for easy interaction with the data, facilitating further research on the topic. Visualisations are also provided for a quicker overview. As a participant in the seminar, the journey led to the discovery of the book: Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination, by Laura Brown, recommended for a deeper understanding of the enduring impact of animal descriptions in classic novels, reaching into our present understanding.
All the different functionalities.
The platform provides versatile search methods, enabling users to filter and quantitatively sort through the data. With a continually expanding library, users can compare different datasets. The interface offers two view modes: actual data and visualisations, for a detailed overview of findings.
The open-source pipeline, fetching, analysing, and writing data into the database, is available on Github. Allowing interested users to explore and easily customise the pipeline to suit specific needs.