The book I chose to analyze was Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince as it was the most recent book I read and I enjoyed it massively. The Voyant tool that was most helpful for me was definitely the collocates web as I feel it best captured Machiavelli’s messaging in terms of how he addressed entities in the book. It was no shock that “Prince” was the most common word in the book given that it was written as a guide for would-be statesmen. The second most common word, “Men,” is indicative on who Machiavelli considers to be a force in the public eye just as “Man,” another common word, shows who he believes is deserving to hold power.
One common word, “Castruccio,” the first name of the duke of Lucca in Machiavelli’s time is interesting because according to trends plot it is relatively sparsely distributed until the last sew sections where it spikes in frequency likely because the latter parts of the book are where Machiavelli turns more heavily into Italian politics.
Using the collocates web I was more able to view the topics present in The Prince. For example, “prince” is most often close to the words “ought”, “make”, “state”, “new”, and “necessary”. From this we can hypothesize that Machiavelli thinks princes ought to do things, they make things, they control states, they make new things, and they do what is necessary with all these notions being key parts of the book. Moving onto the way he categorizes genders, “men” is most closely tied to words like “arms”, “princes”, and “great” whereas the word “women” is connected to words like “subject” and “property”. This definitely corroborates the inferences that I made previously when discussing the most common words.
Using the Voyant tool suite, it would be interesting to see how Machiavelli’s tone on certain concepts shifts or stays consistent over the body of his work. Observing change over time would be a fascinating way to track his evolution as a writer and/or the consistency of his sentiments.
