Linn’s loss of innocence ?

In this blog post I will present my hypothesis in response to the question being asked.

I think Linn does have a loss of innocence because he’s becoming more complacent and less sensitive to the terrible things happening to his fellow soldiers around him. I believe he had to adapt in this way, so he could emotionally survive this horrible war experience. When you’re exposed to bad things over and over again, you usually become less sensitive and hardened to them. This is a common survival and coping mechanism.

I can demonstrate Linn’s loss of innocence with the word “saw” in the word trends. In the first battle he uses the word “saw” frequently, but less often in subsequent battles. He uses this word to describe things he is looking at with his innocent eyes. For instance, when he “saw” a friend. He’s using this word in a friendly and warm context. It seems apparent that as he got further into the war, he used the word “saw” less often because it was too painful for him to see what has happening around him. He was changing his focus and looked at things differently. He was less naïve and less sensitive and he “saw” less

When I used the word “wounded” in the word trends tool, I didn’t believe it was helpful or insightful. This is because the frequency pattern of the word “wounded” did not correlate with my thesis that Linn became less sensitive and had a loss of innocence. The word “wounded” speaks to empathy and sensitivity and I would expect its use to decline as Linn became more hardened. There is a frequency spike toward the end of Linn’s diary, which may be related to the battles becoming more frequent and more intense. This certainly would have resulted in many more people getting wounded. The word pattern seems more related to the intensification of the war rather than his loss of innocence.

Below is a screenshot of the word trends graph. The first thing I did was type in the word “saw” into the “search” bar. Shortly after typing the word, a graph appeared showing the relative frequencies of the word.Then I typed in the word “wounded” into the search bar. I then saw the relative frequencies of the word “wounded” and the word “saw”.

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Word Trends Graph showing frequency of “saw’ and “wounded”

 

Below is a screenshot of the keywords in context tool. After I typed in the word “saw” into the “search” bar all of the ways the word “saw” was used in the diary show up. This tool was extremely helpful with helping me to see the context of the word “saw”.

 

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The key word “saw” in context

 

The value of distant reading is that is that it gives you a different perspective on text, which provides a quantitative and qualitative approach to language. This helps to highlight word usage, frequencies and patterns. Distant reading is quantitative because it computes word frequency and its qualitative because it shows you how he’s using a word and in what context. While this approach is helpful it doesn’t tell the whole story; it misses subtleties and messages that can only be grasped when reading the entire passage in a fluid way.

For example, as the war gets worse and more people are getting wounded, he uses the word “wounded” more frequently. This doesn’t mean he’s more or less sensitive. The circumstances of war can be so strong that it practically forces the frequency of a particular word without regard to values and attitudes.