Prelude as lifespan gauge: Quantifying psychological processes over time

Through multiple versions of Prelude, readers can follow the progress of a poem 41 years in the making, a period that exceeds by far the timeline of its narration. To do so I employed automated analysis platforms LIWC (Pennebaker, Chung, Ireland, Gonzales, & Booth, 2007a) and SEANCE (Crossley, Kyle, & McNamara, 2016). Results reveal that Wordsworth exhibited habits of mind resonant with maturation, especially in his increased positivity and abstraction. Discriminant function analysis revealed four psychological markers that almost completely identified shifts between editions. Indices connoting trust and sadness, as well as positive adjectives and the cognitive indicator of exclusion, accounted for 63 percent of the variance. The study offers a methodology for considering multiple versions of any text in which the passage of time becomes an important marker. I present these findings within a digital humanities framework and conclude by discussing applications.