A Brief Introduction to Cruncher, by Chris Warren

A brief introduction to Cruncher, by Chris Warren

Cruncher takes its name from one function of computers – Number Crunching – but in this case we’re Word Crunching. Computers can manipulate short texts – or very long texts – with lightning speed and enormous accuracy. Cruncher does just that. It offers students, teachers and researchers a range of powerful tools. Patterns of usage that you haven’t recognised before emerge like revelations. Put the whole of Macbeth, say, through the Cruncher, and be amazed!

The results can be applied on the one hand to analysis, insight, and the construction of creative materials, and on the other to the formulation of word-puzzles, anagrams, and crosswords. Real versatility! The outputs feed directly into spreadsheets so you can select and sort and delve into the data. It’s addictive, full of fresh ideas and discoveries. In short, it’s Cruncher.

Using Cruncher

Cruncher uses a browser to work. All you do is paste the text you want to process into the window, select from the options, click Process and new window pops up with your text duly sorted, aligned, treated!

This pack comes with all the featured poems in Word format – so there's an instant bank of suitable material for you to work on. All you need to do is open the poem from the pack in Word. Select all the text (you can do this using the Edit option Select All). Next Copy the text (Edit/Copy). Open up Cruncher. Put your cursor in the empty text window. Go to Edit and then Paste. Your text will be in Cruncher all ready to process.

Finding a text to work on.

Experimenting with the Shuffle poems will probably be where you start. Cruncher works perfectly well with these short texts, and there are some wonderful things you can do with it at that scale. Long texts (like whole plays) reveal other secrets.

TEXT LEVEL SORTING

At first the options may seem a bit daunting. ‘Which boxes do I tick?’, you may think. Don’t worry, whatever you do, your text stays preserved in the Input window. So it’s a case of happy experimenting.

Here is quick guide to get you started.

WHAT THE OPTIONS MEAN

text level

lower case / This simply changes all the capital letters to lower case. Since these are, by and large, a distraction, you’ll find this option very useful. Start with it switched on.
remove punctuation / Again, if you simply want to look at patterns of usage over a whole play, punctuation marks get in the way. Remove them here.

sort

alphabetical / This option sorts the text conventionally, as per a standard dictionary. Use it to create amazingly powerful 'collapsed texts'
reversed / This option works like a rhyming dictionary. To work out the order of the listing, start with the last letter in the word and work backwards. Words ending in ‘a’ come first; words ending in ‘z’ come last. This is a fascinating sort routine, not usually available, and impossible to replicate using a word processor.
no sort / A surprisingly useful option, paradoxically. If used in conjunction with Fold Case and Remove Punctuation you can make any text into the PERFECT English and Word-processing task in an instant! Simply set the class to reconstitute the text with line breaks, capital letters and all the punctuation. Packs a hidden punch!
remove duplicate words / Useful option if you are working on a large text and want simply to research patterns of word use over a whole play without worrying about statistics. If you are creating a classic collapsed text from a short poem, for instance, do not select this option – you WANT all the instances of every word.
remove grammatical words / This option takes out most of the little words – the, a, an, you, me, I, up, down, in, out etc. If you're interested only in the meaningful, lexical words, this is a useful tool. Don't forget that sometimes the grammatical words can reveal things about the text (see the role of pronouns in ‘My Last Duchess’, for instance). Use this filter where it's appropriate, otherwise leave it switched off.

So what can I do with Cruncher?

There are basically two categories of usage – creative and analytical. If we can manipulate an entire text it is possible to re-use the vocabulary – or look in fresh ways at the vocabulary – to make a whole range of new points of engagement and stimulus. The challenge is to offer students these opportunities knowing that different approaches appeal to different learning styles. Ultimately we want to bring the text alive in new ways, not kill it off with the dead hand of technology and numbers – so be careful how you frame the lessons. Always lead with inspiration, the thrill of experiment and discovery, the stumbling-on-treasure factor and the immense creative potential. As with all dull facts, we may discover the number of times that Shakespeare uses the word ‘black’ but it is how we then interpret that fact that’s important. Cruncher doesn’t do that. It does the mechanical sorting and counting; the mind-expanding, glorious interpretation is the prerogative of the human brain – and what this exercise is all about.

Two illustrative Creative uses:

a) Poetry

Collapse a short text using Cruncher leaving Remove Duplicates unselected. The meaning mostly disappears and the original pattern of words is destroyed, but the vocabulary remains. It is like pulling the string from a set of carefully arranged beads.

Present this collapsed text to a class, without in any way revealing its origins.

Ask them to write a short poem using the words, unaltered, and if they use a word they must cross it off the list. No computer is needed, notice. Long hand will do!

What is the result? Well, for a start, EVERYONE can get started because the words are supplied. Secondly there is an enormous diversity of output. Thirdly there is a genetic relationship between every single piece produced in the class, because the same set of words have been used – and crucially, that relationship extends powerfully to the original, as yet unread, masterpiece that was the source.

Read out the poems produced by the class. Are there any common themes, images, ideas? Discuss them, emphasise them.

Now read the original. Echoes? Ghostly similarities?

I guarantee that students will read that poem in an entirely different way, feeling a strange creative kinship with it, as though they too were part of the creative circle, embraced by the same spirit. The effect is nothing short of magic! And all from a collapsed text!

b) Puzzles

The No Sort option in Cruncher allows you to make unusually powerful puzzles – but you must have computers available to get the most out of this approach.

Take a text and reduce to a formless mess – all the words in the right sequence but all the meaning markers absent (a bit like reading the end of Ulysses?). The task is simply to think about where the capital letters and punctuation goes, where the lines break, where the paragraphs are, what is the title and so on. Because a computer is being used, a few key presses can restore the shape of the piece – so the focus of the class is on the meaning and flow of the text, not on the mechanical act of writing the piece out. Absolutely BRILLIANT! Subtle forms of punctuation – the use of semi-colons in poetry for instance can be effortlessly explored. And if you want to work with exotic forms, such as sonnets, what better way for a class to reinforce their understanding of the patterns of rhyme, shape and meaning as defined by punctuation, indentation and stanza-breaks.

Two illustrative Analytical uses:

a) Identifying Word Classes

This comes about because certain word classes have an identifying marker – especially adverbs, regular past-tense verbs, present participles and certain kinds of adjectives. These words are marked by an inflexional suffix. Other classes of words share a suffix or a prefix such as ‘-ish’ or ‘-ishment’ or ‘un-’.

The sorting power of Cruncher allows you to find words by suffix – an instant snapshot of all the verbs in Macbeth! Or all the adverbs in The Tempest!

What does that do? Well, nothing unless an unexpected pattern emerges. One could, of course, laboriously read the text, marking each adverb or verb, then collect them all together. Cruncher takes about 15 seconds to achieve this outcome. You can spend all your time looking at the listing and pondering over the patterns that appear. I personally found it a revelation, looking at the verbs in Macbeth and seeing in the active word elements a swirling, deafening landscape of pain, violence, torture and despair.

Look at this Cruncher generated rhyme-sort listing of Macbeth:

drugged tugged undivulged hanged charged overcharged purged breeched blanched drenched trenched wrenched quenched munched hatched dispatched watched wretched scotched touched vouched weighed shed dashed gashed furbished brandished banished vanished vanquished died studied unsanctified mortified satisfied supplied unaccompanied cried carried buried tied pitied naked hacked wrecked wicked plucked shrieked walked smoked looked marked asked rebuked

Does that make you want to explore more? If it does, then there will be students in your classes who would love to explore and experiment too. And if it does, you’ve got vast electronic resources to exploit and a powerful tool in Cruncher to manipulate the text, extracting the very spiritual essence from it, like some computerised distillation process!

b) Using word-counts analytically

Put a big text through Cruncher and then take the output from Word Level processing into an industrial-strength spreadsheet like Excel. One of the most interesting sorts is by word frequency. First in the list come the little grammatical words: ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘an’, etc. Then just under this big group you may find some outliers – words which have unusual frequency related to the obsessions of the plot. This is the layer to examine very carefully. Does it have anything to tell us about the play?

Performing this analysis with Richard III (it took seconds to do), I noticed the high frequency of words relating to family and family relations. Significance? It sends me back to the play with a lingering question – why the emphasis? Is it the same with every Shakespeare play, or is it special for this one? Like an expanding network of interest, curiosity and obsession I feel the hunger for learning grow. I want to KNOW! I’ve caught the Cruncher bug, and it will not let me go.

ADVANCED USES OF CRUNCHER

Word Level Processing

Word Level

This routine produces a spread-sheet type output, with the words arranged in columns which can be manipulated onscreen.

The key thing to remember, though, is that it is THE FIRST COLUMN that is important. The others just allow the computer to do the sorting, so don’t worry about their bizarre composition!

This is what you see if you click on the word level process button:

While the material is onscreen in this first view of it, you’ll see that column A is arranged in alphabetical order.

If you click on the headwords in any of the other columns the program will sort your text by that column. Click on the same headword again to reverse the order.

Head word / Effect
word / This will alphabetically sort your list, forwards and backwards
reversed / This will sort your list starting from the last letter – words ending in 'a' come at the top of the list; words ending in 'z' at the end. Click again to turn the list upside down.
sorted / This lists all the constituent letters of each word, sorted into alphabetical order. With it you can identify anagrams, since by definition anagrams will have look identical in this column, and will appear next to each other in the list.
letters / This lists all the constituent letters of each word, sorted into alphabetical order but without the duplicates. Great for tricky spelling puzzles
length / Tells you how long the word is. Use it to identify words of a specific length – perhaps for a crossword type puzzle
syllables / Uses a computer algorhythm to count the number of syllables – a bit unreliable, so don't trust it!
count / Counts the number of times a word occurs in the text – superb for analysing key ideas and concepts. Click on this headword twice – the top of the list will show all the frequent words (mostly grammatical ones). Look for the first lexical words to appear. Do they reveal anything about the nature of the text?

Other Texts Not in the Pack

If you fancy going further afield, the Internet abounds with libraries of pre-20th Century literature. Simply put the name of the play, novel or poem you want into Google and bingo, nine times out of ten you’ll find it straight away.

However, as in all these things, there are some pitfalls and snags:

·  The spelling may be the original spelling – wonderful to read, but useless if you’re wanting to process the file for significant patterns of word-use

·  The format of the text may be awkward. It may have been split into irritating little chunks (to stop you grabbing the whole thing in one go?) or may be only accessible by search engine, one line at a time

·  The text may be heavily formatted with great big graphics and illuminated initial letters – not what we want