TEXT ANALYSIS OF THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES

Season 1

Looking at the top 15 3-grams in season 1 we can see a lot of words related to descriptions, or in some cases the lack thereof. In season 1, everything is foreign, the head archivist knows nothing and does not believe any of the statements have any true merit. To keep this veil of disbelief up it is important that the statements, especially the earlier ones, have gaps and uncertainties. By looking at the phrases "don't know" and "i didn't" we can see a difference in how they are used. "don't know" is usually used to convey the unknown, whereas "i didn't" tends to convey disbelief. A minor difference, but still worth noting.

Most of this season (and a large part of the next) is of the same structure, and as such there is not a ton happening in the data besides offering a look into Jonathan Sims(RQ) writing style.

Season 2

Season 2's structure is very similar to season 1's, with one addition, the Archivist is now extremely paranoid and adds an extra "supplemental" recording onto the main statements. There are also more non-statement character interactions in comparison to season 1, but they are still relatively uncommon. This is relevant to the data as the 3-gram "click click archivist" showed up in only this season's top 15.

Due to the formatting of the transcripts, all statements are in one document, so all (almost) all episodes will start with "click click archivist." I suspect that this phrase only appeared in season 2 due to the fact that the Archivist is still the primary speaker and there are more breaks in the recordings. In season 1 there were fewer breaks and from season 3 onwards the archivist is rarely the first person to speak after a cut in the recording.

Season 3

Season 3 introduces a lot of changes to the podcast, new characters, new twists, and most importantly: a new classification system for statements. In prior seasons the statements were filed based on what seemed to be happening in them and/or reoccurring people, however halfway through the third season the concept of 14 types of fear, or powers, is introduced. These powers are all originally referred to as "the _____," and as such I looked into the 2-grams starting with "the." Unfortunately, this yielded far fewer results than I expected. The only fear that was in the top fifteen was "the end," however this is in reference to the traditional usage, not the podcast-exclusive usage. The primary fear focused on this season (the Stranger) appears at #34, below multiple words that were linked to said fear, which I found quite surprising.

It is, however, worth noting that the top 2-gram starts with "the door" Although this is a normal phrase it did bring to my attention just how much this podcast loves to link doors and horror. It makes sense, it is an object that prevents you from seeing what is right ahead of you, but yet you choose to open. Within the podcast, there is an avatar called "the Distortion," who primarily works by luring people into doorways, and my first assumption was to assume that this 2-gram was referring to that, however upon close inspection this turned out to be untrue.

Season 4

Season 4 all but ditches the reliable convention of referring to the fears as "the _____," which is good for podcast flow but unfortunately makes it much harder to view through AntConc. A primary shift that occurs in this season is not in the podcast but in the transcripts. A new transcriber has entered the world of unofficial transcribing and they have a different approach. Looking at the 3-grams I was surprised by the phrase "in the background" occurring 46 times (ranked #16 overall for the season). When I went to look at the word in context I realized that it was due to sound cues throughout the season, this new transcriber phrases the cues differently than the old transcribers, specifying if the tape clicks on or off, or in this case, specifying whether a sound is or isn't in the background.

Aside from that, this season shares many 3-gram conventions with the season prior, which makes sense, as content-wise the seasons have quite a lot in common.

Season 5

This season is the most unique by far, shifting away from the archiving desk job setting our main character has accidentally triggered an apocalypse! Due to his inhuman nature he still has to make statements to survive, but they are no longer the focal point of the story. Despite this, the statements due tend to take up at least two-thirds of the episodes that they appear in, so they do have an impact on the n-grams. "I'm sorry" being the 6th most said 3-gram is unsurprising, as by the final season most characters have a lot to apologize for and there's no better time than the end of the world. This is also quite fitting as the last line of the podcast is "I’m sorry, and… good luck." Due to the prominence of the fear entities I decided to try searching up the phrase, "the ____" again and came up with more interesting results.

"The archivist" is the top 2-gram in this query (and the 14th most popular 2-gram overall), which makes narrative sense as the people around him almost exclusively call him by his title as opposed to his name. "The eye," the primary entity throughout the podcast, is ranked #4, and by looking into KWIC view we can see that it is the correct usage. "The end" suffers from the same pitfall it felt in season 3, this time being partnered with the phrase "the end of the world," as opposed to its in-universe exclusive meaning. I also inspected the usage of "the spider," as they are important later in the season, however almost all uses of the phrase came from one narration-heavy episode.

Voyant Tools

Due to the formatting of the podcast transcript, I have blacklisted character names in Voyant, so as not to skew the data. One implication of this is that it subtracts every instance of the words "archivist" and "daisy." It is also worth noting that the archivist's real name is Jon, however unofficial transcribers have fought over if it is spelled "Jon" or "John," and as such it is not consistent in the transcripts whatsoever.

First looking at all 200 transcripts we get a basic word cloud that shows something similar, but not the same. There are still occurrences of words like "don't, "didn't," and "know," however, we now have more words such as "like" and "just." This makes sense, as these are words that are used more colloquially, and as such wouldn't come up as frequently in 3-gram phrases.

An interesting trend that I noticed was the graph tracking the usage of the word "statement" over time. At the beginning of the series every statement starts with a declaration of intent, whereas later on, mostly in the final season, statements are simply implied and not explicitly declared.

The graph slowly decreases as time goes on, however, it is worth noting that the various fluxations occur for three primary reasons. The first reason was addressed above, as many statements later on are undeclared. However, until the final season, statements continue to be declared a great majority of the time, leaving two factors to impact the trajectory of the graph below. The first factor is that as the story continues some episodes do not feature statements at all, however, this is a rare event, hence "statement" remaining in the top words throughout the series. The second factor is that throughout the story the concept of a "statement" becomes more relevant to the plot, and as such characters mention statements as a concept and not as a declaration more and more throughout the story. These 3 factors combine to make a graph with a downhill trend, but not entirely without uphill fluctuations.

By not excluding names we can see that Jonathan Sims (Archivist) (the archivist) speaks the most at 5338 occurences, Martin follows at 3715, and Basira at 1451. The links view offers us a good view of the connections and context in which these characters occur. The Archivist lies at the center, as the main character with the most connections, and Martin falls right next to him, however, his main connections are with filler conversational words. Basira's context within these words is mainly with her connection to the Archivist and Martin, not many of the other words on the web. The Archivist has the most exclusive connections, whereas Martin has only the word "I'm," whilst Basira's exclusive connection is that of her detective partner Daisy.

Compared to Antconc, Voyant is able to give us a better timeline on what is happening, as specific words fluctuate more than phrases, however, in both, we can see a consistent writing style throughout. The reliable presence of the statements allows for similar words and phrases to be displayed from season to season, regardless of the other goings-on in the background. This is impressive, as the podcast spanned 5 years and Jonathan Sims kept a reliable style throughout the series.