How do themes come up across an entire series of novels? If each book shares characters, settings, and events, shouldn't they also share thematic elements? This project tackles that problem in Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire Series—a collection of six novels published between 1855 and 1867 that take place in Barsetshire, a fictional English county.
This was the first project I did as a Digital Humanities Scholar at Swarthmore College. My advisors were Rachel Buurma of the Swarthmore English Department and Nabily Kashyap, the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Swarthmore College. Throughout the semester, I worked with a seminar on Victorian Literature led by Rachel. They helped identify topics that might give rise to a visual interpretation, and we converged on tracking thematic changes throughout Trollope's series.