Alex Reuneker

Day nine, the penultimate chapter of The Evenings! What is the chapter about? Well, we'd have to read the chapter to answer that question, of course, and I will do just that this afternoon, but we can already get a grasp by doing another keyword analysis. We'll approach the analysis a bit different, however, as we will not use the British National Corpus as a reference, like we did on day three, but we'll compare today's chapter to the rest of the book, so chapter 1 to 8 and chapter 10. That way, we're sure we'll make a fair comparison, and atop that, we will not have the problem of (Dutch) names dominating the list of keywords.

If we leave all default options on in the Keyword Analysis Tool, we get the following keywords for today.

Keywords in chapter 9 of The Evenings, including zero counts

Still, we see hoogkamp, a name, on first position, which is not unexpected, because Frits meets with him for the first time today. As Eduard Hoogkamp introduces himself by his surname ('the young man who had introduced himself as Hoogkamp'), this name is indicative of this chapter. It occurs thirty times, much more often than the other keywords in the list, such as chapel, cemetery, and, a personal favourite, hoopla. That last word is interesting, as the Dutch original reads 'hoepla, hoepla, hoeplala', but the English translation does not double the last syllable in the last repetition. It simply reads 'hoopla, hoopla, hoopla'.

But what about the fact that most keywords in the top 10 do not occur at all in the reference corpus? To those so-called 'zero counts', a frequency of 0.5 is assigned, which is the default solution in keyword analysis, but I have just added an option to the Keyword Analysis Tool to discard words from the results that do not occur in the reference corpus. Let's see what this does to the results.

Keywords in chapter 9 of The Evenings, excluding zero counts

Now we see hoogkamp has left, as it does not occur outside of today's chapter. Interestingly enough, the character by that name is referenced to again outside chapter 9, but only by his first name Eduard (see position 6 in the results). Other keywords that do occur in the rest of the novel, but are significantly more frequent in chapter 9 are bet, uncle, screen and funeral. Bet occurs five times and all on the same page, when Jaap tells the following anecdote, which always makes me laugh, as it is both funny and really inappropriate.

'Don’t let me forget to tell you about that bet,' Jaap said. 'Then,'' Frits continued, 'we have baldness as a result of a disease of the hair or the subcutaneous fat, and thirdly there is baldness due to old age. And if you ask me, I believe that yours is a case of number two: a hair disease.''

'Have you heard the one about the fellow who says to his friend: you’re not healthy, I bet you have anaemia?' Jaap asked. 'So he says: I bet you have anaemia. No, come on, the other fellow says. Sure as sure can be, the first one says, would you like to bet? They bet twenty-five guilders on it and the second fellow goes to the doctor for a check-up. The first one waits outside. After a while his friend comes out of the office, skipping and dancing”—he spread his arms as though taking flight — and he shouts: Ha! I won! I have stomach cancer!'

All in all, keyword analysis can provide some more quantitative insight, but the real fun is in reading, of course. So, have fun reading again today!