DIGIT 100 Corpus Analysis Assignment

For my corpus analysis assignment, I chose to compare two documents from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The documents I chose were from The 36 Lessons of Vivec, which are a collection of sermons(term used loosely) written by Vivec, a god within the Elder Scrolls universe. The lessons are an autobiography, a description of godhood, and a story weaved by Vivec, neither fully truth nor lie. Still all being written by Vivec in universe, I thought it appropriate to compare them.

Starting with the first sermon I immidiately noticed something that I suspected might happen when analyzing these documents. These sermons are on the shorter side which meant the analysis of them would reveal less of a pattern and more of an explanation of what each sermon was about.

Looking at the word cloud and freaquent words, the most important words that stand out to me are "netchiman's", "wife", and "egg". This first sermon is about the birth of Vivec, which was a complicated ordeal to say the least. The netchiman's wife refers to the mother of Vivec who is never given a proper name and is always refered to as such. Egg is used frequently to refer to Vivec before they were born. Two other freaquent words seen in the cloud are "comes" and "came". These hold significance because many beings visited Vivec before they were born to give "gifts" to them. Gifts is a loose term here because they proceeded to make the birth of Vivec more complicated in meaning.

The 36th sermon tells the tale of how the Dwemer(Dwarves of the Elder Scrolls Universe) rebelled against their rulers, the three gods known as the Tribunal, which Vivec was a part of.

It was here that I noticed both of these sermons had a similar average words per sentence, which could mean a pattern of sermon length. The seemingly most important frequent words in the 36th sermon were "dwemer", and "almsivi". This makes sense as the Almsivi, another name for the Tribunal, and the Dwemer were the main factions of this event. Two other frequent words I saw were "world" and "sea". Just these 2 words alone can describe the scale of the event that lesson 36 tells the story of. The event that took place had a very profound efect on the land of Tamriel, the eruption of the Red Mountain, Vivec ascending to godhood, and the entire race of Dwemer being wiped from existence.

As I compared these documents, I saw that they were both very different in narritive, telling 2 completely different but connected tales. Written by the same author about the author meant a lot of recurring language. I mainly chose these documents through because I really love Elder Scrolls. The lore is definitely confusing and absurd at times but it's fun to dive into.