186: Aesthetic Divergence: Graphing the Distinct Differences in (Dis)pleasing Highlighting data

Presenter(s)

Jacob Phillips, Allison Simpson, Jacob Okulewicz, Milena Sinistaj, Carly Wholihan, Nikita Nambiar

Abstract or Description

The Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab (DHLC) at Michigan State University is conducting an interdisciplinary study of sonnets seeking to examine the similarities and differences in the aesthetic pleasure that English majors and non-English majors (students from the Psychology pool) experience while reading poetry. This study was run in two rounds, the first consisting solely of English majors, and the second round consisting of participants from the Psychology pool. In the study, participants were tasked with highlighting moments they found aesthetically pleasing in green and aesthetically displeasing in red. The lab compiled the data by counting how many times each word was highlighted for each data set. The lab graphed this qualitative data to visualize the results and then compared the results of both parts of the study. When initially looking at the graphs, we found that the trends between the two groups were more similar than initially hypothesized. However, as we continue to analyze the data, we noticed distinct moments of diverged data around certain words or phrases that create visible spikes in the graphs. Our group sought to determine whether there were more moments of distinct difference in the positive or negative highlighting. We hypothesized that the displeasing data would show more drastic moments when the two data sets differed in highlighting. The DHLC believes that understanding these moments of difference is important because it can provide valuable insight into why people respond to texts in certain ways.