Melville's Bits of Wisdom


This graph represents stylometric calculations of whole
texts of Melville's works and whole texts of
philosophical works Melville is known to have read.
While hovering over the graph, scroll to zoom in and out.
Hover over a dot corresponding to a text to examine
works that are stylically similar. By clicking on the dot
you can drag the text node and isolate its stylistic cousins.

Most of Melville's texts are clustered toward
the bottom of the graph. At the top, the works of
philosophers that are stylistically distant from
Melville include Schopenhauer and Aristotle,
whereas in the middle, works by Xenophon,
Diogenes Laertius, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Browne,
and Robert Burton link to Melville's works.

This visualisation was produced using the
stylo package in R (Eder, Rybicki, and Kestemont, 2016).