A Quantitative Analysis of the Royer Didier

Type: Digital humanities project write-up (summary — full text at the publisher)
Year: 2020–2021
Advisor: Virginia Blanton

Professor Blanton and I had planned an archival trip to the Getty to hunt for the exemplars behind Royer’s 1902 manuscript. The COVID-19 lockdown closed that door in the summer of 2020, so we rebuilt the project as a computational study: I transcribed the French text by hand, split it into plain-text files by manuscript section, and ran the corpus through Voyant Tools.

The result changed how we read the book. The most frequent term is not “Didier” but “Dieu.” A text I had been reading as a life of the saint is closer to a story about God, with Didier as the supporting character — and “Didier” turns out to collocate most often with “nom,” which pointed us toward the name itself and its root in the Latin Desiderius, “the desired one.” Both findings carried into the Different Visions article.

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