Who doesn’t love mystery books? The mystery books of murder specifically have always been a puzzle that satisfy the reader’s mind. That’s where Stevenson’s stories pop up. His novels are partly horror fiction as well as a mysterious puzzle to solve. He caught our attention since we had already read some of his works and we liked his writing style full of grit, drama and excitement. What we love about it is that we enjoy linking the hints and the unexpected parts of the story to solve the crime, but at the same time, we feel the terror behind the murder’s danger. We also found a pattern that was recurring in his novels: he loved to showcase the duality between good and evil, and how each and every one of us is haunted by both of them. His best example of that to date is surely in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where the main characters, Jekyll and Hyde are both the same person, and each one of them respectively represents good and evil. However, in that story it is highlighted to the extreme since one of them is a highly respected and likeable doctor, and the other has a horrific personality and is a murderer. In addition, we realized that all of his stories have male characters as the protagonist and that some of them even completely lack female characters throughout the whole story; which reflected the Victorian Era he used to live in. And so, our final DH project is entitled: “Robert Louis Stevenson: The duality of good vs evil expressed through male characters”.
The main goals of our project were to be able to dig as much information on Robert Louis Stevenson’s life achievements as possible and to link them with the two main topics mentioned above:
- The duality of Human Nature: Good vs Evil
- The underwhelming role of women in the Victorian Era
Using numerous digital tools and platforms such as Voyant-Tools, CliC, Google My Maps and TimelineJS helped us explore and study our project from different perspectives. Our final DH project was presented in a timeline which helped us keep track of our research and all the information we gathered concerning our topic in a very precise and neat way.
Since we started working on our project, we really dug deep into Robert Louis Stevenson’s work and made sure that the goals we set for our final outcome could be met by analyzing his novels. We focused on what stood out the most in Stevenson’s stories and we noticed that he was obsessed with the contrast of good and evil as he compared it to the society surrounding him; we felt like this fitted what we wanted to do exactly in order to portray the Victorian Era mentality. So we didn’t really feel like we had to change the direction of our project since it projected Stevenson’s vision about human nature. Also we noticed a notable lack of counting on female characters in his works, and felt like this was a point needed to be developed, since the role of women has greatly progressed since the Victorian Era, and this merely gave us an idea of how our world is changing.
Born and educated in Edinburgh, Stevenson suffered from serious bronchial trouble for much of his life, but nevertheless continued to write and travel widely in defiance of his poor health. While mapping the author’s life achievements, we realized that he was so dedicated to his writing considering he was able to write one of his most famous novels The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in just over a month. In addition, he got inspired by his many travels and chose the places he visited for the settings of his stories. Another reason behind his travels was the people he met along the journey; he met the love of his life as well as a lot of influential people that helped him in his writing career to become the Robert Louis Stevenson we know in our modern time. Stevenson was fascinated by the human’s duality and shows it when Dr. Jekyll confesses to Utterson that his own duality captivated him, a condition that affects all men.
Voyant-Tools and CliC helped us understand his novels without actually reading them by highlighting the most repeated words, that were pretty much male-related, looking for the sentences located before or after a certain word, finding hidden aspects in plots by transforming them into networks… In addition, it allowed us to have an unbiased opinion on these books since these platforms examine the texts as is without having any emotions involved as we would if we had read them. For example, if we, the female members of the group, had to read the corpus and study it, we would have probably been offended by the lack of female characters and our analysis would have been different because of our emotions towards the stories. Moreover, Distant Reading compiles objective data about many, many works. While computers can’t ‘read’ and understand a novel in the way people can, they are very good at searching for specific information you give them and finding patterns. And this allowed us to gain a lot of knowledge about his works in a very direct way.
Mapping has the potential to be a very important tool to complement novels and other literary works. Google My Maps allowed us to contextualize what and where major events were happening in the stories. It changed the way the plots look and feel like for us and assisted us in connecting dots that look isolated. The different maps that were done for each novel helped us in understanding social relationships between characters and locations.
Our final DH project was presented in a timeline which helped us keep track of our research and all the information we gathered concerning our topic in a very precise and neat way, with few design tweaks. TimelineJS definitely helped us expand our scope since it allowed us to enrich our project with illustrations. We are proud to say that the last look into our project is very pleasing to scroll through.
Finally, the two digital platforms WordPress and Twitter helped us share our project and reflections with the public. Twitter allowed us to update and stay updated with our classmates’ works thanks to the class hashtag which we really enjoyed reading.
Hope you enjoyed our blog reflecting on our final DH project!
Anna, Marc & Tara
Anna's Blog 