Three Words and Search Biases

This blog post ended up being more difficult than I was expecting it to be, which I will speak to in a moment. These are the words I came up with for each issue:

The Crisis: War, School, Fight

The Egoist: Power, Creative, Experience

The Little Review: Love, New, Song

The Crisis was by far the easiest one to find words for, due to my previous experience with this issue, which resulted in some bias in my word search. Knowing this was published close to the end of WWI, it's obvious that the whole issue is centered around the war effort and the fight over in Europe. However, the advertisements in the issue are focused on the reincorporation of soldiers on the homefront, fighting for civil rights and education for veterans.

Meanwhile, The Egoist and The Little Review are more focused on the artistic explorations of modernism, as opposed to the explicit social concerns in The Crisis. The pieces in The Little Review seem to be focused on the content of the art, while The Egoist, emphasized by the lengthy editorial by Dora Marsden questioning the "real," is concerned with the more philisophical elements of modernism, and the creative experinces the movement allows for.

However, something I realized doing this excercise was the amount of influence my previous biases had on the words I looked for. As I mentioned in my brief paragraph on The Crisis, my working knowledge of the context and paratext of the issue impacted how I looked for terms, on top of the generally exhausted mindset I was in while hunting for terms. So my distant reading of this issue was obviously greatly affected by my biases, which is something we should keep in minds while doing this sort of work algorithmically. Algorithims are still written by humans, so they are just as vulnerable to biases. I'd say the biases could be mroe dangerous, since algorithms move much faster and search for patterns faster than any human could.