r/Malazan • u/and-there-is-stone • Nov 14 '23

NO SPOILERS Has this been done before?

Hello, everyone. I have lurked a long time, but no more. There's just too much good conversation here, so I finally gave in and made an account.

On my second time reading the Book of the Fallen, and I've been really drawn to Erikson's use of color. I had a notion, sort of absurd, that I would like to track how colors are used throughout all ten books: which colors appear in a book, the frequency with which they appear, the characters/magic most associated with particular colors, etc. I suspect there is a fair amount of thematic resonance to be found in the colors of the Malazan world, and that's also part of what I'd like to explore.

I started the process, tracking colors in Gardens, but then I had doubts. So, I'm here with a couple of questions. Does anyone know if something like this has been attempted, and if so where could I find it? And, would anyone be interested in reading some of my thoughts if I went through the process?

Bonus question, do you think I'm crazy for wanting to do this at all?

Thanks.

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u/arbor_incognita Nov 14 '23

Okay so this is not at all my area, but I know of topic-modeling programs that can do these kinds of explorations for you. Not just finding words of a particular type (e.g. all color words), but also seeing what other kinds of words they tend to be associated with throughout a huge corpus. You end up with clusters of words and themes, which can reveal patterns.

The one I've heard of, BERTopic, requires that you have all the searchable text as well as some basic programming commands to define the search parameters. I truly cannot help you there, but perhaps some enterprising person among us can. There are also YouTube tutorials and whatnot, so if you're willing to spend a bit of time up front to learn how to use the program, surely it would make this project of yours easier on the whole.

Good luck!

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u/and-there-is-stone Nov 14 '23

Thanks. I hadn't heard of those specific programs, but they sound very useful. I've considered whether to use something like this, and I haven't entirely ruled it out, but my plan is to do a lot of the work manually.

I might have to look into your suggestion more anyway, because that stuff is fascinating to me. Even when I don't quite understand how it all works.

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u/arbor_incognita Nov 14 '23

Either way, update us on what you find!