The Jedi Way: A Linguistic Analysis of Anakin Skywalker's Fall to the Dark Side in Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Document Type
Panel Presentation
Start Date
22-4-2021 3:30 PM
Keywords
Linguistics, Coding, Star Wars
Biography
Sydney Adkins is an undergraduate student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and a member of the Society of Yeager Scholars. She serves as the Vice President of the Anthropology Club and the Campus Outreach Chair for the Marshall Pre-Law Club. Her focus lies in the areas of law and linguistics, combining the latter with her love of pop culture and sci-fi.
Major
Anthropology
Advisor for this project
Kristen Lillvis, David Cartwright
Abstract
This presentation examines three main linguistic components of the character Anakin Skywalker in the T.V. show Star Wars: The Clone Wars to determine if there is a verbal indication of his development from Anakin Skywalker into the villain Darth Vader over the three-year course of the Clone Wars. A program was created in Python code that analyzed the corpus, comprising every spoken word or sound Anakin made over the course of seven seasons, and retrieved data from the corpus. The three areas of focus were the frequency of a preselected list of positive and negative words; the positive and negative connotation surrounding the terms “jedi”, “council”, and “war” determined through a close reading; and the average sentence length for each year. The analysis later determined that there was little to no indication of Anakin’s development in the frequency of the predetermined set of words nor in the average sentence length, however the close analysis of the sentiment surrounding the terms “jedi”, “council”, and “war” shows Anakin’s changing mindset as he moves closer to his metamorphosis into Darth Vader.
The Jedi Way: A Linguistic Analysis of Anakin Skywalker's Fall to the Dark Side in Star Wars: The Clone Wars
This presentation examines three main linguistic components of the character Anakin Skywalker in the T.V. show Star Wars: The Clone Wars to determine if there is a verbal indication of his development from Anakin Skywalker into the villain Darth Vader over the three-year course of the Clone Wars. A program was created in Python code that analyzed the corpus, comprising every spoken word or sound Anakin made over the course of seven seasons, and retrieved data from the corpus. The three areas of focus were the frequency of a preselected list of positive and negative words; the positive and negative connotation surrounding the terms “jedi”, “council”, and “war” determined through a close reading; and the average sentence length for each year. The analysis later determined that there was little to no indication of Anakin’s development in the frequency of the predetermined set of words nor in the average sentence length, however the close analysis of the sentiment surrounding the terms “jedi”, “council”, and “war” shows Anakin’s changing mindset as he moves closer to his metamorphosis into Darth Vader.
