1. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as
as Analyzed by TextArc
by
Trevor Wilkes
LIS 554
Fall 2014

2. How I Began the Project
● I began this project by rereading Crime and Punishment.
● I keep a spreadsheet of the
words in the novel that
pertained to the theme of
“mental illness” in Raskolnikov’s
character.
● I soon abandoned the spreadsheet
approach, because there were more
efficient ways to approach the project.

3. Text Visualization Attempt # 1
The first text visualization tool I explored was Wordle:
http://www.wordle.net/
● I cut and pasted the e-
text of ch. 1 of the
novel into Wordle.
● The word frequencies
made a nice collage.
● Word frequencies do
not tell the full story.

4. Textual Visualization Attempt # 2
● I tried out the Voyant Tools
text visualization tool:
http://voyeurtools.org/tool/Links/
● When pasting in the text for
ch. 7 of Crime and Punishment,
Voyant Tools did not eliminate
stop words automatically.
● Having the stop words as main nodes
of the tree created a visualization, which
was not particularly useful.

5. Textual Visualization Attempt #3
This 3rd visualization
was done by using
Docuburst:
http://vialab.science.uoit.
ca/docuburst/index.php
The layout of the term
“depression” was
interesting; however,
Docuburst looked for
definitions of depression
other than those of
melancholy.

6. The InfoVis Tool I Selected: TextArc
● TextArc (http://www.textarc.org/) is a textual
visualization tool that allows many lines of text
to be sifted through in a short time.
● The box on the right says,“Show text,”
which allows for text searching in the novel.
● Highlighted is one of the
sentences in the novel I
wanted to visualize.

7. TextArc Visualization: Raskolnikov
● Here is a
visualization of
the frequency
of the word
Raskolinkov.
● The orange
rays link out to
the grey ellipse
where the
protagonist’s
name occurs in
the green text.

8. Using the Concordance with TextArc
● By employing the
concordance
TextArc allows
for a search of
the word
“anxiety.”
● The 31 occurrences of the
word “anxiety” are mapped
out with orange rays to the
places they appear in the
text in green bands.

9. Mapping Specific Words in the Text
● Here is an example of
highlighting the key
words that occur in a
sentence in Crime and
Punishment.
● These words are then
mapped out to places the
occur throughout the body
of the text. Notice
“position,” “late,”
“ceased,” “weighing,”
“anxiety,” and “poverty”
are all mapped.

10. Associations with Romanovitch
● Here is an example of an
association mapping to see the
words and character names that
Raskolnikov’s middle name
Romanovich links to.
● In this picture, only the orange
rays relating to Romanovich are
drawn to the outside grey ellipse.

11. Associations with Sonia
● Above are the association mappings for Sonia, the daughter of
Marmeladov, who Raskolnikov falls in love with.
● Listed are links between “Sonia,” “Raskolnikov,” her mother, and father.

12. Associations with Razumikin
● To the right are the
associations
between,
Razumikin,
Raskolnikov’s
schoolmate, and
other characters.
● Razumikin’s
character is
displayed through
the adjectives
used.