Abstract Topic:

Voyanting Jane Austen’s Works to Reveal Knowledge Patterns: A Text

Mining Study
Being a busy digital native of this contemporary era, humans have become too busy to study
each and every word of complete works of any renowned figure for instance Jane Austen
who is a mouthpiece of 18th century novelists to critique reliance of women on British landed
gentry and the necessity of wedlock for each female. Humanly it is a very gigantic task to
quantify all her works to unveil various knowledge patterns pertaining to trends in her
dominant works. Therefore, this study aims to unveil knowledge patterns about presence of
various themes in her works and her stylometric features through Franco Moretti’s distant
reading technique. For this end, this mixed method study follows Research Onion to conduct
this research. Voyant text mining tools have been designed by Stefan Sinclair and Geoffrey
Rockwell for text mining process. Furthermore, data visualization and its interpretation will
enrich knowledge discovery process. Generated data have been interpreted with the lens of
triangulation of Knowledge Discovery Theory and Hermeneutics Theory. Major findings of
this study show key motifs, their presence in Jane Austen’s different works and stylistic
features of each work. This study implicates in the domains of digital pedagogy and
educational data mining and its beneficiaries are learners and teachers of English literature.
Key Words: text mining, knowledge patterns, distant reading, Voyant, educational data
mining

Words: 209
Author: Zafar Ullah, PhD English Linguistics Scholar at NUML, Islamabad
Instructor, Virtual University, Lahore
zafarullah76@gmail.com 03468620004