ASSIGNMENT
The question you choose to study might vary greatly in scope and specificity. In the same way you’ve chosen your own text or set of texts, you should also choose your own question to answer something that drives your interest. Here are some sample questions to give you some ideas, with parenthetical additions suggesting the kind of thing that would bear further consideration in the Discussion section of the report:
- The words “good” and “evil” show up a lot in the Bible. Do they show up in the same places, or does one only appear when the other is absent? (And how do we interpret our results?)
- The word “power” and related words like “powerful” play a crucial role in The Wizard of Oz. With what other words are related to it, and how are these words used? (And what does that suggest about the distribution of power in Oz?)
- Which parts of a text have smaller or bigger sentences on average? (And how does that relate to what’s happening in the text in these places?)
- Which key words are notably missing from a set of texts when we might expect their presence, or which words are used with surprisingly high frequency when we wouldn’t expect them? (And how do these findings shift our understanding of the source material?)
