Words in Numbers
Words matter but numbers hold value as well. The wordclouds of the previous page convey an image to the viewer letting them know instantly and in an aesthetically pleasing way which are the most important words, but the human eye and brain cannot easily transform the information provided into comparative statistics. The barplots displayed on this page, however, can. Even though the barplots cannot compete with the wordclouds in aesthetics, they do facilitate a clear sense of which are the most frequent words in each collection.
Statistics based in numbers provide a clear basis for comparative approaches to the study of any text. They are not equally relevant for different kinds of purposes and always need to be treated with critical thinking. In this case, word counts and word frequencies do provide an entry point into comparing the different zhiguai collections in a quantifying approach, going away from the words and turning to numbers. Of course no one can claim to be studying a text if all they do is analyse numbers, but in these barplots, the connection to the text is always a given by the fact that each word count references a character from the text.
A more detailed study of the text based on numbers will be possible with the addition of TF-IDF scores, providing an understanding of the uniqueness of each character and taking into account the context it appears in. As the project develops, such scores and resulting visualizations will be integrated into the current exhibition.