Emotion Mining of The Unwomanly Face of War and Red Birds

Abstract

An increase in distant reading and technological innovations facilitate linguists to create accurate data visualisation and knowledge patterns efficiently. This methodological paper reveals positive and negative sentiments from the selected novels to detect and validate their genre. It is problematic and time-consuming to decipher positive and negative sentiments with quantified knowledge during close reading; therefore, digital tools empower us to conduct sentiment analysis accurately. There is a need to determine the co-relationship of sentiments of the selected two war novels with their genres. A team of linguists designed Inten Check to conduct emotion-mining. Here, the mixed-method study reports that the word 'war' has been used 69 times in Red Birds and 662 times in The Unwomanly Face of War. The words "kill", "cry", and "death" are mentioned 31, 17 and 27 times, respectively, in Red Birds, and 126, 73 and 86 times, respectively, in The Unwomanly Face of War. In conclusion, the most frequently quoted words express the emotions of anger, sadness, fear and disgust, while the least cited words express the emotions of joy and surprise in both novels.

Keywords: Inten Check, Emotion mining, War, The Unwomanly Face of War, Red Birds