ENGL 8203: Digital Humanities

http://voyeurtools.org/tool/TypeFrequenciesChart/?corpus=1329252640907.4758&stopList=stop.en.taporware.txt&type=people&mode=corpus

I am having technical difficulties this morning with images. I wanted to compare the differences between man and woman in the journals. I thought it was interesting to find that men dominated in all of the journals except for three issues. I could not get the images to work on the journal to further my interest but I would like to go back and look at it later.

The three issues that woman came up much more than man were: 1.11 1915 -Feb; 7.1 1920 -May/June; and 7.2 1920 -July/Aug.

I also compared people and people sticks to the middle in between man and woman. In the majority of the issues men are spiked and women are not as high. As soon as the images are back up I'd like to figure out what some of the issues are about and why those three particular issues are focused on woman and the rest are mostly male based. 

http://voyeurtools.org/tool/TypeFrequenciesChart/?corpus=1329252640907.4758&stopList=stop.en.taporware.txt&type=heaven&type=hell&mode=corpus&freqsMode=raw

I am having SO many technical issues, I think it best just to embed the URL for this particular chart.  Anyway, I compared "heaven" and "hell" in order to see how often the "Little Review" published material relevant to either concept, and to see which concept won out.  In a time of strife and war, it is possible that a society's notion of Heaven or Hell, and their concern with one or the other may reflect their opinions about the war. 

Interestingly, under the September 1914 "Little Review," the Voyant chart shows a peak in usage of both of the terms, and the content reflect this correlation.  While the table of contents does little to explain the form of the graph, upon looking at the contents, one sees material such as Ford Madox Hueffer's "Hell: (A Part of Heaven Overlooked by Ford Madox Hueffer)"

Hell

(A Part of Heaven Overlooked by Ford Madox Hueffer.)

Heaven and Hell are together.

As we walk home on a street in Heaven, in the evening,

Those in Hell will stalk past us

(For Hell is a condition, not a place)

And when we return at dawn will we still see them—

Men bearing infants born dead,

Kissing the inert purple cheeks ;

(For the kiss will be the one punishment of Hell) ;

Men and women holding the severed heads of those they once spat on.

Before a king kissing the head of his queen will we stop,

To give him a kind word ;

Or before an anarchist clasping the head of the king;

Or before a woman carrying the head of the anarchist—

Each unaware of the other's presence.

We will see them walking up and down the streets of Heaven

For countless years,

Till the day when the heads will disappear,

And the head-bearers build homes next to our own.

It is hard to decipher precisely the attitude intended by the man who would be Ford Madox Ford, but perhaps that is precisely the point.  The society is ambivalent about WWI, which had just begun two months prior.  But death is certain, even if everyone is not entirely aware.  It seems that, perhaps, Heaven and Hell can coexist because suffering and happiness can coexist in a society. 

http://voyeurtools.org/tool/TypeFrequenciesChart/?corpus=1329252640907.4758&stopList=stop.en.taporware.txt&type=great&type=good&mode=corpus

I found this exercise to be very interesting, in part because I understood how to navigate Voyeur easier than I did Gephi. Manovich's article also helped, because I was able to see what Manovich referred to as "media visualization" (i.e. the tag cloud by which we select words to research.)

After a few random tries, I became interested by the graph that resulted from my search of the words "good" and great." In particular, in March of 1917, there is a decline in the usage of the word "good," and a sharp increase in the usage of the word "great."  I was curious why this could be. (An educated guess led me question whether the reason might result from articles of the "Great War").

Interestingly, there was no mention of the term "Great War" in the magazine.  However, it appears that the word "great" may have entered the subconcious of the public as they anticipated the US entry into the War in April of 1917. This may be supported by the fact that only about half of the uses of the word "great" in The Little Review held a positive connotation.  The term "great" occurs more often as a descriptive word with a negative context, or as a descriptive word with no obvious bent towards either a positive or negative view.

I think it is noteworthy that there were three different books advertised in the magazine in which the word "Great" appears in the title.  Perhaps there was great anxiety as well as understanding that the time at hand was distinguishable from any the world had every seen.

Lastly, I should mention that the only uses of the word "good" in the magazine were in reference to art (Examples: "good musician," "good work of art," "good art," etc.)  My guess is that the writers and editor of the magazine considered the humanities to be one of the only things a person might label as "good."  World War I expanded the human imagination in darker ways.  People, governments, militias, etc., were found to be "bad." People must have been floundering to identify something as inherantly "good," and in the case of The Little Review this label was concretely attached to the discipline of art.

Using the Voyant Tools graph I discovered something interesting when I separated the words “Soul”, “Artist”. “Light”, “Music” and “Hand”  from the rest of the words. They were at the very bottom of the words list although there were still a large number of the words. The word soul ended up becoming the one with the highest points, in fact it was volume 6 no. 5 issue of “The Little Review” that soul was at the highest of its peak and outdid all of the other words combined. When I looked at the issue I realized that first item might have been the cause for Soul being peaked to its highest from what I am calling as the “poetic short story” titled “Cast Iron Lover” by Else Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven. Constantly she uses soul in her work and clearly is a source of why soul was at its highest peak, an example would be the constant use of “mine soul”.

It is the word “Light” however that at the end of the graph continues going upward out of the other words. It is due to the last issue of “The Little Review” on ModJourn, volume 9 no. 5. Many of the works of literature in this issue reflect a combination of light and dark by infusing light with night.  I found this to be extremely interesting as it was a winter issue of “The Little Review”. So I found it interesting that the top words of the combination I created were “soul” and “light”. “Music”, “hand”, and “artist” were of the lowest, including in the list. So I found that surprising considering one would think artist at least would have been higher. But I guess if the artist referred to them as such it would be disrespectful or just wasn’t in the mood of their works? Music and hand were more understandable.

Reading the graphs of “The Little Review” I discovered that even though the words I chose were used less in the whole magazine, they were still pretty important to the works that the magazine published. I was surprised by certain peaks of the words such as soul’s triumphant peaks and then light outdoing soul in the very end. I found the graph could definitely be used since there was data to back it up for arguments if needed and was pleased by the result. I really liked the fact too that the graphs were pretty clear cut. VoyantTools showed different ways for people to view the usage of words and I felt that it was a good of being able to allow people to see how the words were used in “The Little Review” and that it could be further explored from that area. 

I have been having trouble with this program in several ways, but one of the things that perks my interest is that Death happens to be linked with just about everything. It is the biggest piece in "The Little Review". With the readings in this journal it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that death has a big hand, but the fact that it touches a small piece of everything in the magazine is interesting. 

The other side of that is when you filter religion, death goes away. Death is linked to both Greatness and Aesthetics, but when you filter aesthetics or greatness one or the other disappears. Death appears to be the link between many different pieces, but just because it is the main link does not mean those other individual pieces are linked to each other through death. Death holds everything together and without it the majority of the pieces fall away. 

My first objective was to group the dots similar in size together.  I discovered the vast difference in size between similarly related dots.  Death and decay (located in the bottom right corner), for example, are two that differ in size the most, but seem to be closely related otherwise.  Further investigating this oddity, I isolated the themes directly linked with death:

This produced even more surprising results.  Death has a stronger connection with greatness than with war, decay, senility, aging, or dissolution, which are all minor blips on the graph.  But, even this connection with greatness is somewhat inconsistent, as mediocrity takes second place. 

I felt the need to include religion, the lone strayer, in this model of death.  The theme seems appropriate with the topic of death, as even praise and memorial might suggest (but not necessarily require).  However, strangely enough, religion lacks a connection with any and all of these themes.

I've had a lot of trouble figuring out how to go about acquiring usable information from Gephi—while I have traditionally done well in English and decently in math, the areas of qualitative and quantitative study are extremely segregated in my mind.  As a result, I spent a good deal of time fiddling with settings, messing things up, reopening the file, and trying again.  When it came down to it, changing the settings didn't reveal anything new for me.

What I ended up doing was to consider Moretti's analysis—removing points of data and looking at their effect on the overall network—and see where I could go with that.  What I did was a series of removals with a particular sequence of steps.

1) Screenshot

2) Delete the most heavily linked pieces of data—those that show up large and red.

3) Screenshot.

4) Reapply the node size and colour parameters so that the next largest pieces of data move up to attention.

5) Screenshot.

6) Repeat steps 2-5 until no points remain.

I have put together a gif to provide an overview of the process.  (It seemed a bit saner than trying to upload 16 similar screenshots…)

Some observations… In the earlier stages of this process, it was plainly obvious to identify a few nodes at a time to remove—themes and genres early on, and eventually authors, then finally particular works.  As I went on, the number of nodes to be removed became larger and larger, indicating a growing uniformity in the "value" of those nodes.  By the time the values were that unified, the connections were almost the minimum necessary to keep the remaining points all part of the network. 

I found it interesting that, going about in this manner, it took until the 6th iteration to isolate a node from the rest of the network.  The entire web was so interconnected that it took a lot of removal to isolate anything.   This is one of the primary reasons I find Gephi a difficult medium to extract information from—the complex interconnectedness of the points, growing out of a subjective process of tagging, does not lend itself easily to identifying structural centers.  Using the language of Moretti's article, the central points stand out quite easily—death, art, greatness, etc.—but the structural centers are much more elusive.

I think as far as quantitative analysis goes, I would be far more interested in looking at the frequency of particular words in texts or something along those lines, as this would be far more objective and would reveal something that hadn't already been revealed by the process of labeling and sorting, which is the case with the thematic tagging we have here.

I really am enjoying messing around Gephi. It’s an interesting way to look at written works. I hope we can learn how to do it because I would love to do this for other works. Anyway I had fun fiddling around with Gephi’s color system so I could better see the nodes. Not that the black isn’t cool or anything, but I just wanted to see what it could do. It was really interesting how the color system worked. And it made it easier to see everything connected with one another. I could clearly see death/writing (they were on top of each other) and greatness as one of the biggest nodes. Poetry was also a big node however I only deleted death/writing and greatness. When I deleted those three nodes I was greatly surprised with what occurred.

As it can be seen from the graphs the nodes deleted ended up making a triangle with Poem, poetry and T.S. Eliot. I’m not sure what this means exactly but I found it interesting that poem and poetry would connect and even more so that T.S. Eliot would connect with both. Does that mean that T.S. Eliot is primarily poetry? Or does that mean that poetry is primarily T.S. Eliot? See? It’s a confusing conundrum. Yet within this triangle everything else connects with it in some form whether directly or indirectly. So poetry is unaffected by death/writing/greatness nodes as is poem and T.S. Eliot.  So does that mean that these subjects are not part of T.S. Eliot in the Little Review 1918 issue?

I am not sure myself but Gephi enabled me to see how things can change if you remove nodes so I then removed poetry. By removing poetry the triangle was gone and there were clear connections from poem to T.S. Eliot. I also was able to clearly see other straight forward connections like Irony to Mediocrity, Aesthetics to Literature. I found these to be the most in your face nodes after deleting poetry. Is it possible that these direct connections mean that irony is a weakness, and that literature is a form of aesthetics or vice versa? It is truly interesting to use Gephi to go into a work of literature and see how it is represented. 

A portrait by Jack Yeats-His brother

The Wide World
Vol. 25, No. 146
Pitt-Kethley, Andrew (editor)
London: George Newnes, Ltd., 1910-06

The Tyro:
A Review of the Arts of Painting Sculpture and Design
Number 2
Lewis, Wyndham (editor)
London: The Egoist Press, 1922

Coterie:
A Quarterly: Art, Prose, and Poetry
Nos. 6/7: Xmas Double Number
Green, Russel (editor)
London: Hendersons, 1920-12