So What Can I Do with Cruncher

So what can I do with Cruncher?

There are basically two categories of usage – creative and analytical. If we can manipulate an entire text it is possible to re-use the vocabulary – or look in fresh ways at the vocabulary – to make a whole range of new points of engagement and stimulus. The challenge is to offer students these opportunities knowing that different approaches appeal to different learning styles. Ultimately we want to bring the text alive in new ways, not kill it off with the dead hand of technology and numbers – so be careful how you frame the lessons. Always lead with inspiration, the thrill of experiment and discovery, the stumbling-on-treasure factor and the immense creative potential. As with all dull facts, we may discover the number of times that Shakespeare uses the word 'black' but it is how we then interpret that fact that's important. Cruncher doesn't do that. It does the mechanical sorting and counting; the mind-expanding, glorious interpretation is the prerogative of the human brain – and what this exercise is all about.

Two sample creative uses:

a) Poetry

Collapse a short text using Cruncher leaving Remove Duplicates unselected. The meaning mostly disappears and the original pattern of words is destroyed, but the vocabulary remains. It is like pulling the string from a set of carefully arranged beads.

Present this collapsed text to a class, without in any way revealing its origins.

Ask them to write a short poem using the words, unaltered, and if they use a word they must cross it off the list. No computer is needed, notice. Long hand will do!

What is the result? Well, for a start, EVERYONE can get going because the words are supplied. Secondly there is an enormous diversity of output. Thirdly there is a genetic relationship between every single piece produced in the class, because the same set of words have been use – and crucially, that relationship extends powerfully to the original, as yet unread, masterpiece that was the source.

Read out the poems produced by the class. Are there any common themes, images, ideas? Discuss them, emphasise them.

Now read the original. Echoes? Ghostly similarities?

I guarantee that students will read that poem in an entirely different way, feeling a strange creative kinship with it, as though they too were part of the creative circle, embraced by the same spirit. The effect is nothing short of magic! And all from a collapsed text!

b) Puzzles

The No Sort option in Cruncher allows you to make unusually powerful puzzles – but you must have computers available to get the most out of this approach.

Take a text and reduce to a form-less mess – all the words in the right sequence but all the meaning markers absent (a bit like reading the end of Ulysses?). The task is simply to think about where the capital letters and punctuation goes, where do the lines break, where are the paragraphs, which is the title and so on. Because a computer is being used, a few key presses can restore the shape of the piece – so the focus of the class is on the meaning and flow of the text, not on the mechanical act of writing the piece out. Absolutely BRILLIANT! Subtle forms of punctuation – the use of semi-colons in poetry for instance can be effortlessly explored. And if you want to work with exotic forms, such as sonnets, what better way for a class to reinforce their understanding of the patterns of rhyme, shape and meaning as defined by punctuation, indentation and stanza-breaks.

Two illustrative analytical uses:

a) Identifying word classes

This comes about because certain word classes have an identifying marker – especially adverbs, regular past-tense verbs, present participles and certain kinds of adjectives. These words are marked by an inflexional suffix. Other classes of words share a suffix or a prefix such as '-ish' or '-ishment' or 'un-'.

The sorting power of Cruncher allows you to find words by suffix – an instant snapshot of all the verbs in Macbeth! Or all the adverbs in The Tempest!

What does that do? Well, nothing unless an unexpected pattern emerges. One could, of course, laboriously read the text, marking each adverb or verb, then collect them all together. Cruncher takes about 15 seconds to achieve this outcome. You can spend all your time looking at the listing and pondering over the patterns that appear. I personally found it a revelation, looking at the verbs in Macbeth and seeing in the active word elements a swirling, deafening landscape of pain, violence, torture and despair.

Look at this Cruncher generated rhyme-sort listing of Macbeth:

drugged tugged undivulged hanged charged overcharged purged breeched blanched drenched trenched wrenched quenched munched hatched dispatched watched wretched scotched touched vouched weighed shed dashed gashed furbished brandished banished vanished vanquished died studied unsanctified mortified satisfied supplied unaccompanied cried carried buried tied pitied naked hacked wrecked wicked plucked shrieked walked smoked looked marked asked rebuked

Does that make you want to explore more? If it does, then there will students in your classes that would love to explore and experiment too. And if it does, you've got vast electronic resources to exploit, and a powerful tool in Cruncher to manipulate the text, extracting the very spiritual essence from it, like some computerised distillation process!

b) Using word-counts analytically

Put a big text through Cruncher and then take the output from Word Level processing into an industrial-strength spreadsheet like Excel. One of the most interesting sorts is by word frequency. First in the list come the little grammatical words – 'the', 'a', 'an', etc. Then just under this big group you may find some outliers – words which have unusual frequency related to the obsessions of the plot. This is the layer to examine very carefully. Does it have anything to tell us about the play?

Performing this analysis with Richard III (it took seconds to do) I noticed the high frequency of words relating to family and family relations. Significance? It sends me back to the play with a lingering question – why the emphasis? Is it the same with every Shakespeare play, or is it special for this one? Like an expanding network of interest, curiosity and obsession I feel the hunger for learning grow. I want to KNOW! I've caught the Cruncher bug, and it will not let me go.

Finding a text to work on

In the case of pre-20th Century literature, this is easy. The Internet abounds with libraries of the stuff. Simply put the name of the play, novel or poem you want into Google and bingo, nine times out of ten you'll find it straight away.

However, as in all these things, there are some pitfalls and snags:

The spelling may be the original spelling – wonderful to read, but useless if you're wanting to process the file for significant patterns of word-use

The format of the text may be awkward. It may have been split into irritating little chunks (to stop you grabbing the whole thing in one go?) or may be only accessible by search engine, one line at a time

The text may be heavily formatted with great big graphics and illuminated initial letters – not what we want

The text may be all there, but is could have tens of pages of copyright information appended to top and bottom and inserted in the middle

The character names may not be relevant to your research, you might simply want to look at Shakespeare's poetry, the actual text of the play, rather than who says what. This can be fixed. Teachit will eventually have specially edited versions of popular plays for you to use ready-made – or you can try editing one yourself if you feel brave and know about advanced Find and Replace.

Don't despair if the first texts you call up are hopeless. Keep looking. What you want is what computer buffs call the plain vanilla text and you want it, if possible, in its entirety. There are many sites that offer Shakespeare in this form. Possibly the most useful for our purposes is this one from MIT. It is an old site, with out-of-date references on the front page, but for that very reason it's ideal! This is where we will find our vanilla text, untreated and un-fussed-over by technical irrelevancies.