Cole Conlon
The hardest part about reading Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year” is keeping up with the location and where all the deaths are from. I tried coming up with a solution to see what parishes are most talked about in helping me better understand. So, I chose to take a deeper look at the relevance of each parish. I decided to create a line graph on Google, and I took a decently large sample size of some of the parishes in the novel and looked at how many times they were talked about in the novel. I wanted to see how many times each parish was mentioned and see where H.F had spent most of his time. It is sometimes hard to keep up with the location of the narrator. H.F. is constantly being told different stories and sometimes may be in one location and hearing stories of a nearby parish. It is also easier to see where H.F. has traveled and where the plague is most severe. My data set was quite interesting and showed that St. Stepney, St. Mary White Chappel, and St. Giles Cripplegate were the most referenced parishes. All of these parishes were referenced more than 25 times. A couple other parishes that were mentioned over 20 times were, St. Giles in the Fields, Aldgate, and Southwark. There were a few parishes that were hardly mentioned in the data and those were, St. Brides, St. Albans, and St. Mary WoolChurch. Those three parishes were only mentioned once. The reader is able to look at the novel in a different way when able to group the parishes together. I believe that one major flaw with the novel is the struggle to keep up with the location of H.F. It is very easy to get lost in the stories that are being told to H.F.. I believe by using this data it is easier to understand what parishes were struggling the most with the plague. Also allows you to better comprehend which parishes were most visited. This data may also help you understand how the plague itself was moving throughout the novel. I think this is extremely vital to the reader, as I lose focus of where I am at times while reading, due to the novel being quite dry at times. I think the graph I made is extremely influential and is perfect for what I hoped it would be able to do. It gives you an idea of the most important parishes and helps keep up with the pace that the story moves at. This graph was extremely helpful and definitely did what it was intended to do. It allowed me to be able to understand the movement of H.F. and the plague itself. It also helped me gain a clearer understanding of the stories being told.
Cole's Re-coding of Literature 