I was also interested in and amused by Veliza. I don’t know if I gained anything about the actual text of the Crisis from this tool, but it was certainly entertaining, and at the least I gained some decontextualized familiarity with the various issues from the fragments spit out when I selected the “from text” response option. Thinking of temporary structures within a historical flow, from Moretti: I remember being in New York and being surprised to see ads on the subway about an app that would connect you with a therapist to text back and forth with. This format of a text conversation between therapist and “patient” feels like an example of Voyant’s playing around with a temporary structure (texting with a therapist, a structure of the current moment) within the historical flow of data visualization. (This is not even to get into the way that psychotherapy has evolved over the years into a dynamic that works through texting.)
Voyant
Submitted by Emma Willibey on Mon, 10/12/2020 - 13:51
Poking around on the Voyant page for the Crisis was kind of fun! I initially was having some bug trouble with the drill-down feature—I was trying to see the distribution of terms within a document but I don’t think the website would let me. Regardless, I found that “school” and “high” were both markedly popular words in volume 22, no. 3, which was published in 1917, although I don’t know the significance of that. It was also interesting to make connections that I could have already put together but for my lack of historical knowledge. For example, “women” was used most in volume 10, no. 4, which I see was published in 1915, the year of a notable women’s suffrage march.
Comments
Marianna Albom
Tue, 10/13/2020 - 17:43
Permalink
When it comes to the
When it comes to the magazines, I see that each one is trying to carve out an identity and be at least somewhat different from its competitors. You have one that is focused on woman's issues, while mine were from the Egoist and focused on poetry, novels, and importing political ideology from Europe, especially France, Russia, and Germany. Americans were greatly influenced by writers from the Western Continent, and adopted their ideals into movements for the working class and other social issues.
Moretti plays with characters, graphs, and charts to look at character interactions in a new way. It makes one realize who is in the room when certain information is discovered and the butterfly effect it will have on what happens in the story. Moretti focuses on explicit interactions rather than implicit, which does limit the possiblities of his graphs. I wonder what would change if he added these other interactions. Would he find other useful data, or would it confuse the information he already had and expose weaknesses to his diagrams? Could it even hurt the author? This sort of feels like putting metaphysical sand in a sieve to find objects a person might want for their data. You 'shake', mix up, or delete the characters around in different graphs or trees, and it gives different angles on their interactions.