ENGL 8203: Digital Humanities

It is a very good thing that I am not trying to go to the market or else this story would have a different ending, probably of me getting lost somewhere in Dublin and never being heard from again. Good for the kid for finding his way through Dublin. 

Looking for the word Space in our magazines, led me to a few revelations. At first, I haphazardly started looking through all of them, but after it crashed my chrome window I changed my mind. Before chrome went down though, I did get to see that space was essentially irrelevant to most of these magazines. In fact, the only interesting numbers or graphs were spawned from the Egoist and the poetry selections. Even then, it wasn't what I was looking for. I was hoping for some shreds of sci-fi, maybe some speculation about spaceflight. Alas, this tool--and others like it, seem to be best for confirming or denying the existence of what you are looking for in a text.  While I was looking for spaceflight, I found more about philosophical interpretations of space and time- as in the egoist. Whereas with most of the others there was little coherent use of the word space. The context aspect of voyant made this all too easy to determine. I feel like DH tools would allow one to look for elements or themes in a work without actually having to read about it. All you'd have to know is what keywords to use. 

write some stuff

Using the Voyant Tools lab to view The LIttle Review was another really interesting process for me. Again, i am not a visual learner so I felt that a lot of it would be lost on me. Some was, but I did appreciate the way in which we could view the relationships that different words, ideas and issues of the magazine fit together. It was especailly intriguing to view the word frequency through the context of hisotry. For example, the word war dropped off almost completely in 1918, just before the Armistice. Additionally, the word feminism was used several times in early issues of the journal and then dropped off completely for te rest of the issues. 

I think it would be good to do the lab with a more targeted goal. For example, if certain people were given certain words to research both in the context of the magazine and in the history surrounding it. I know that we were just playing around with it to familiarize ourselves. However, I think I personally would have gained more from the lab with a litle more direction. For instance, I learned that "burger" was not a slang term used in the early 1900's, but hamburger was mentioned in one issue several times. That's a fun fact but not super useful in understanding the actual journal and it's content. 

The Gephi visualization of The Little Review was an interesting experience for me. I am not naturally a visual learner, so I was skeptical about its merits. I felt really apprehensive about dealing with a beta computer program that I ws unfamiliar with as well. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the lab. The original cluster of dots and lines was confusing and stressful, but when we began to pull about the different words and view their connections to each other, it began to make more sense. It was fascinating to see simple concepts, such as poetry, having so many connection in one issue. 

It also helped me to view the spreadsheet as I was working through Gephi. There was something about using a program that I was familiar with to help navigate an unfamiliar one that I found helpful. It also added a lot to my viewing of the site to work through it with someone else. Miranda Dabney and I played around with the site together because it was having trouble downloading on her computer. I think it would be really helpful in the future to do small group analysis of the different sections. 

When searching through the archives, I was immediately drawn to a publication from the early 1900's titled The FreWoman. The Freewoman is a weekly feminist review. I found it quite interesting because at that time in history, the majority of women were focused on the right to vote and nothing else. This publication, however, focuses on many complex women's issues that we are still facing today. The journal, while full of thought provoking and beautifully written essays and articles, struggled financially and was only in publication for a year. This fact makes the existing volumes even more valuable. 

After much careful searching, I decided to focus exclusively on an essay entitled "Feminism Under the Republic and the Early Empire." I took two years of Latin here at TU and in that time, I learned a great deal about Roman culture and famous poets, so I found this piece to be especailly intriguing. It takes a look at feminism, or lack thereof, in Roman times. It depicts the role of the Roman wife, along with her duties and expectations. It also describes that state of the laws of the time. Women were mostly prohibited from education and legally, were unable to attend any political or monetary power. Women were simply in a state of submissive to whomever the most prominent male in their life was. They were passed from father to husband and sometimes, in the case of the husband's death, to the son's control. 

This essay was written on November 23, 1911. It is classified as an essay. It features topics such as Women, Feminism, and Women's Issues. It is featured on pages 7-9 in the journal. The Freewoman, and this piece in general, is still relevant to women's issues today. It is important to know the history of our gender in order to know where our gender needs to focus in the future. This essay relates not only to other esays and articles in the Freewoman, but to The New Age publication as well. Many female writers at the time wrote for both. 

In The Bookman: an Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Life Vol. 32 No. 3, on page 41 in the advertisement section, I found an ad for a picture of the destruction of Richmond during the Civil War. The main hook is that everyone that fought in the Civil War is dead and the only ‘witness’ that never dies is a photograph. There is a big image of the picture printed at the top and the bottom is split into another description and an order form.

It’s next to other advertisements, some for books and one for travelling. Since this is just an advertisement, the rest of the journal doesn’t specifically relate to this. This issue had a lot of advertisements, but this one stood out because the whole top half was a picture. The other thing that made this one stand out was that the bottom half was separated diagonally instead of rectangularly like most of the other ads.

The Stolen Archive was an interesting piece of work to explore. In the author's statement, Alice Gambrell lays out her vision and goals for the work. 

"As an experiemntal archive, Stolen Time means to encourage visitors to think about the mixed significances communicated by any public collection of pirmary doecuments and objects; an archive is a practical resource, of coures, but it is also (by virtue of practices of inclusion, exclusion, arrangement, annotation, display and mode of access) a kind of argument. 

This attitude, and the set up and functions of the archive remind me of Werner and Voss's text, which we read earlier. The idea of an archive serving as multiple functions is definitely embodied here. The archive is the site, yet it is also what every indidvudal does on the site. By observing research, more research is observed. It is an extremely experiemntal way in which to observe the writing process. 

I'm not sure how effective I think it is. I really enjoyed reading both the author and the designer's statements and views more than the actual archive experience itself.