ENGL 7453: Modernism In/And the Archive

"I think I'm getting the hang of this Gephi thing!"—My famous last words. 

Anyways, the potential of Gephi and data mapping in regards to literature is, honestly a little thrilling? It's a whole different way of reading works that we've read for ages. Like I mentioned in class, the example work Gephi uses to demo their software is characters in Les Miserables. It might be too much to say that the potential of software of Gephi it makes these works feel new, but the idea that there are overlying structures that we don't usually see and now can... That's amazing! It's like we have X-ray vision. 

Now, applying the software to my data proved more challenging. I think my nodes might have been broken somehow, since I only had twelve, and it was easy to make mistakes that I didn't know how to undo, but following the step by steps from Gephi and Dr. Drouin, I think I was able to at least sort of arrange the data how I wanted. It had shapes and colors, and when you export as a PDF, it does this beautiful curve thing. Quite nice to look at. 

The thing I guess I am still so intrigued/frustrated by, is how it feels difficult to know which questions are the right to ask. I guess in the humanities I'm so used to the more philosophical and theoretical side of things it feels weird to look at something this mathematic. Once you have a graph organized and layed out is when the questions really start to arise. In this case, it really layed out the thematic soup all the authors were living in. Relatable! 

I tried to embed my photo, but I don't know that it succeded so I am also linking a photo to my work. 

As an editor of a literary journal, you can't go much lower than a themed issue. It's the absolute zero of the creative writing world. An editor's sad nadir. A literary journal's last death cough from a consciousness that's blinking out. The other day, an email arrived in my inbox from some literary journal straddling uneasily the periphery of relevance. They were advertising a new call of submissions for a scab themed issue. The advertisement read:

Not quite broken, not quite mended. A reminder of what was, and what will be. Scabs protect our wounds, and yet the temptation to pick at them and peel them off is always there. They call attention to what is already disappearing, and we don’t yet know if they will leave a scar. Scabs are a reminder that healing can be a long, ugly process.

It's the kind of thing that should make any creative with dignity left blush. Yet, it's also kind of instructive, right? It announces what we already know: a lot of people are in pain right now, so a lot of people are writing about pain. Scabs are wounds. Scabs are painful. Scabs are a kind of healing. Scabs are ugly. Pain-->scabs-->wounds-->healing-->ugly.

What I’m trying to say is that Gephi allows us to access these kinds of associative networks that we are always consuming as we read. And we know exactly what we are consuming, but we don’t talk about it, because it’s obvious and kind of embarrassing to talk about. Ugly correlates with scab, because scabs are ugly.

The fact I spent my time trying to operate Gephi with all of the subtlety of a baby trying to fit the triangle shape into the square hall isn’t the point. The point is clear. Identifying associative networks is requisite element of performing close reading is. Gephi just allows us to access what we already know but can’t express yet. Turns out: every issue is a themed issue.

I think there was some kind of error in my data importing process. While I agree with the topic tag connections, there are duplicate tags that will list different permutations of the same words. I would have to do more investigation to figure out how to eliminate the duplicates. They make the graph more cluttered than I would like.

The Yifan Hu layout algorithm seems to bifurcate the data based on the amount of connections between tags; in the chart that I’ve created that filters the ID network by relationship to James Joyce, the network produced by the Yifan Hu layout is two wings connected by a central node of the novel, which is a convenient visual to conceptualize the two main written works related to Joyce. When the full data set is arranged in the Yifan Hu layout, the duplicate data creates a lot of visual clutter as the data separates into grouped islands; I’ve included a screenshot of one island, where I can note the centrality of the term “poetry,” although the rest of the data is a bit jumbled.

Given the limits of visuality in the Yifan Hu arrangement, I was pleased with the image generated by the Fruchterman Rheingold layout, which created a modular arrangement that flexes upon rearrangement to maintain the relationship between nodes. I felt that this model was more visually intuitive (although that may be partially because of the visual limitations of the duplicate nodes) because it kept the data contained and connected rather than dispersing it into discrete islands, which I think models the conceptual relationships between topics.

I think this network visualization is a useful method for periodical studies (given the future ability to import data without error…) because it reveals relationships that are not evident upon close reading, but, once revealed, may help guide/inform close reading. I think I could benefit from this procedure as a way of giving a fresh set of eyes to the same brain.

...felt so technologically inept as I do now while trying to navigate all these fun new tools (*cough, Gephi) I never knew existed, so I might as well blast all my shame here for everyone to see. Once upon a time I might have rated myself as technologically proficient (although even that seems like a stretch now), but I have permanently disabused myself of any notions of ever being 'tech-savvy.' I used to laugh when my Dad struggled with basic computer usage because I didn't get how hard it was for him to navigate unfamiliar territory, but I'm sure not laughing now (sorry Dad!). 

To add insult to injury, that blank space ↑ is where the picture of my Gephi Little Review is supposed to appear; apparently I don't even know how to share an image of how much I don't know how to use Gephi. (I uploaded it to Shutterfly & copied the link because I don't know how else to get an image url.)  

I have muddled my way through Gephi as much as possible, but I honestly have no earthly idea what I'm doing and nothing really means much. I can't tell if there's anything missing, or how the nodes really relate to each other through the edges; because of this, I can't offer an educated opinion on the genre and topic connections. I thought the Fruchterman Reingold layout was more aesthetically pleasing than the Yifan Hu layout, but I didn't really glean anything different from one or the other. Despite this, though, I think Gephi is a veritable treasure trove of potential for literary analysis of all kinds; the samples show how well it works with Les Mis and it would be really fun to see Moretti run his Hamlet analysis through Gephi. I get the idea even if I don't actually get it. 

(And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to hide in a corner and try to figure out how I got technologically left behind in only my thirties...)

Whenever I teach English Composition, I tell students that good writing is really only a matter of building bridges only you can build; making connections no one else can make is what separates an essay that is a rote mechanical exercise of getting words on paper from a creative expression. One day I will write a paper about Joycean neologism in Finnegans Wake and neologism in the music of Young Thug. But that’s for another response. Point is: when I went into Voyant for the first time, I was excited all of the new avenues of bridge building that the digital humanities provide. I was drawn immediately to the contexts and correlations sections at the bottom of the window. The correlation that interested me the most was between the words “children” and white.”

It’s a curious correlation for a number of reasons. In a journal made by and for black Americans, why are white children appearing so often and so close to one another? I can’t help remembering my disgusting priest’s classroom in my wasted Catholic high school. A pro-life poster that read “black children are an endangered species,” was the only permanent fixture on his only bulletin board. We passed it every time we were dismissed. Dear God, a species. Of course, no analogous poster exists for white children. A bias, even an unconscious one, is obvious: white children are, well, children. Black children are not. Consider Tamir Rice, the twelve-year-old boy who was shot for carrying a toy gun. For black children in this country, childhood and play ends prematurely. As soon as black bodies appear within the institutional gaze, childhood gives way to a long adulthood. Now, obviously I’m reaching, but I think that’s the while point. The process of the reading and building the digital humanities not only allows for, but encourages reaching and grasping for ideas that are just beyond the periphery of traditional paper scholarship.

Looking at The Crisis through Voyant was a novel way of reading through text that ultimately proved to be quite difficult. In particular, I found it hard  to know the right questions to ask. 

The thing about the sort of close readings I am used to, is that your brain is the machine, indexing and interpreting in ways that we don't think twice about. It’s like walking versus driving. You can do things with a car that you could never do by just walking, but you have to adapt your thinking to the vehicle's mode of transportation. The kind of connections that we make through reading the text have to be manually input by us, yet, without satisfactory knowledge of the material I was feeding Voyant, any question or hypothesis felt like a stab in the dark. 

I wanted to know if the language surrounding race changed over time in The Crisis, and so I plugged in the words "negro" "colored" and "black", and my results were... inconclusive. I had assumed that as time went on, negro and colored would go out of fashion and Black would become far more popular, but that wasn't the case. Even futher, there are no results for "African American", I hadn't realized how recent the term was.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=18a5cf1225c6141837902f3e4bb35c15&stopLi...

Overall, negro and colored were both used seemingly interchangably, with black being far less used overall. in the last few data points, however, use of colored and negro is down, while black remains the same. I'm not sure what exactly to make of any of it. 

Regardless of how much more removed I felt, it turns out, distanced textual analysis still requires one to get their hands in the mud and grapple. Reading Crisis through Voyant only convinced me of the need of both distanced and closed reading working together in tandem for more complete picture. 

Considering the range of publication years of The Crisis, I used Voyant Tools to see the woman’s suffrage movement fused in the magazine along with the race issues. Since it was not a one-time movement, but a long-term one, I found it super helpful to track the movement within the circle of The Crisis columnists and audience, using Voyant Tools which extracts the results across the whole series of magazine issues. I first typed in “suffrag*” and saw the five peaks—04.5 being the highest, then 10.4, 15.1, 11.1, and 12.3 in sequence—in the graph that deal with the suffrage movement the most. Thinking that it is not as often as I imagined, I became curious about how frequently The Crisis deals with any issues pertinent to woman and typed “woman*.” As it’s shown in the graph below, the top three peaks coincide with the results of “suffrage*,” which reveals that one of the main social issues The Crisis printed in relation to woman is the woman’s suffrage movement, at least before 1920s.

Meanwhile, I became curious about whether the suffrage issue dies down after the 19^th Amendment, and so I typed in the words, “disfranchise*,” “enfranchise*.” The result below shows that “disfranchise*” has a highest peak in 21.4, which seems to speak that after the enfranchisement for all people, the magazine is harshly critiquing the issue of disfranchisement still existing out there.

The experience of distant reading with Voyant Tools definitely helped me have a fresh perspective to see the construction of the context around the readings in longer period.

I've lived in Tulsa for just over a year now, but I'd spent my entire life in Arkansas until the big move. When poring through The Crisis, my first inclination was to see how many times Arkansas and Oklahoma appeared. It's no secret that both Arkansas and Oklahoma have had catastrophic racially motivated massacres. Using Voyant, I was able to pinpoint the related issues quickly, as well as compare their total mention frequencies.

I was somewhat...relieved? that Arkansas and Oklahoma didn't come up as frequently as the Deep South, but it was still gut-wrenching to read the listings of lynchings that occurred. The Elaine Massacre happened in early October 1919, but I was fascinated to read about a lumber plant employing 500 African Americans in Crossett and plans for new manufacturing plants in Hot Springs in the November Issue. A year and a half after the Elaine Massacre the Tulsa "Race Riot" Massacre occurred, and the July 1921 Issue  does feature a chilling report and a photograph of the devastation. This is the ugliest possible history, but it's absolutely crucial that we learn from it to heal the country and the people. 

The process of visualizing was very interesting because the unique images and ways to look at and analyze a text really enlightened me to different ways that I can view a text. Looking up words in the text and viewing specific trends on them really enhances this concept of "reading a text." Playing with and maneuvering the different tools allowed me to be placed in a different context of "The Crisis" with each new tool that I observed. For example, the visualization tool Mandela was particularly fun to engage in. It was similar to a web of words all connected through different colors. When the cursor was placed over a particular area, the lines connected to specific words would connect to one particular "Crisis" section, but I would like to learn more about how this works specifically because this looks to be a useful tool. While trying to figure out how to make this tool concrete I found where Voyant gives a description of the tool and states, "Mandela is a conceptual visualization that shows the relationship between terms and documents. Each search term (or magnet) pulls documents toward it based on the term's relative frequency in the corpus." I'm interested to unpack this to see how I can implement this tool in the future.

As someone who relies on skimming content occasionally when pressed for time, I feel Voyant Tools gives me superhuman abilities to search for content I need. Similar to Google delivering me results based on keywords used in online content (or embedded in the back end of a content management system, Voyant allows me to select specific online content in which to search for keywords. Having seen that The New Freewoman was once an option for perusal in this lab, I was inspired to search The Crisis for a keyword that would overlap with the previously mentioned publication: Women (both the word and the root).

You can see in this graph there are a few key areas where the word (or root word) "women" was mentioned more frequently than others, so I decided to test a hypothesis: Did the two issues with the most significant amount of mentions focus on equal rights for women? I pulled up another Voyant window and searched only for “rights” to get the results below.

That graph also peaks on the two issues that most frequently use the word (or root word) “women,” so I decided to check those issues out. Beginning in order of date, I went to Volume 4, Issue 5 of The Crisis which was published in September 1912, almost eight years before the 19^th amendment was ratified.

Based on the title, "Women's Sufferage Number" I can see why this issue would mention “women” and “rights” more often than other issues, which led me to assume that the following issue must also deal with women’s suffrage. So, to investigate, I pulled up Volume 10, Issue 4 of The Crisis which was published in August 1915, still five years before the adoption of the 19^th amendment.

Not a shocking result that the title of this issue is "Votes for Women." As you can see by the cover, this issue also focuses heavily on women’s suffrage. Although neither of them fall on the ratification of the 19^th amendment, these issues still hold key perspectives on the women’s suffrage movement, and I feel there is an excellent opportunity to use Voyant in the future to explore this topic, and endless others, in depth.

The process of visualizing The Crisis allowed for a more distant reading of the text, enabling me to follow trends/issues rather than reading piecemeal updates. In an attempt to view the effects of a singular event, I've inserted an image below (as I was foiled in an attempt to embed a view via HTML) of the graphed instances where the phrase "Birth of a Nation" appears in The Crisis. I was interested in following the discussion of the release and reception of the controversial white supremacist film, which was protested by the NAACP. The first ocurrence of the film title in The Crisis is in the context of a May 1915 article titled "An Instance of the Way the NAACP Works." 

The graph evidences the surge (and later resurgence) of evaluation and protests of the film. The initial NAACP efforts to censor the film for its racist content were dispelled by the approval of the Board of Censorship. I searched The Crisis for "Board of Censorship," and, surprisingly, the relative frequency graph looked like a singular spike in usage, which implies that the release of "Birth of a Nation" was, at least in The Crisis, the most inflammatory episode of controversy with the Board of Censorship. (The major spike in frequency of "Board of Censorship" comes from the same issue of the first mention of "Birth of a Nation.") This mainly raises more questions for me. What was the relationship between the NAACP and the Board of Censorship? Was Birth of a Nation a singular event, the epicenter of film censorship and racial conflict, or was it just the only one (or the most chronologically significant one) to be covered in depth by The Crisis? (Where is Dr. Jackson when you need him?) The structural evaluation afforded by Voyant is a helpful way to reveal these initial relationships to be explored by later close reading.

As the Crisis was a magazine written for African Americans and their experiences in the early 20th century, I focused my graph searches on their concerns over time. Looking at the word war, it is one of the most frequently used ones in the series. Black soldiers did their best to volunteer despite racism in the the first world war.

Of note, I found no mention for racist or racisim, but I did find words for discrimination and prejudice. However, the graph shows that these mentions are lowered over time. I do not belive it is because of ending racism, because I found many instances of the word lynching below.

I believe, based on the data, that African Americans became more concerned with other major issues over time, especially past world war I. If you look at the graph below, mentions of money, homes, and education, and college started taking over talking point distrubution after the war.

The highest points at the end are money and home, which seems to become a major factor when talking about the issues that effected them the most. Economic factors became a bigger concern over time as jobs and education took the forefront of their needs.

On a side note, the word negro appears to decline over time, while the word black takes the place of favor of the the writers. I do not know what this switch is to be attributed to, as the data is insufficient to hazard a guess at the time I am writing this. I can say it is a fact that the terminology for African Americans has changed many times over the centuries, including, Negro, Colored, Black, and Afro American. Based on that, I would observe African Americans want to shape their own cultural identity outside of how others view them, on their own terms. This magazine was one way for them to have the freedom to take charge of their own destinies and strive toward a better future despite the inequalities they endured.