Chair Jason "My Buddy" Jones
Samantha York and Jordan Wilke, "Debinarizing Corpus Analysis"
Contemporary textual analysis projects often replicate and therefore naturalize binarized approaches to author and character gender. We often find that analyses focus on the standard “male/female” split and in so doing fail to open up their approach to other gender identities.
While Laura Mandell observes the fact that "computational methods offer the opportunity to denaturalize gender categories," she also highlights the need to remain attentive to "where and how computational data analytics crosses the line into naïve empiricism." In the spirit of breaking down this habit, we chose to revisit our 2018 Gender/Novels project. While the project provided meaningful insights into how male and female characters are described in 19th century literature, the structure of its code foreclosed a more nuanced approach to analysis.
Over the course of the past semester, we tried to address this problem by refactoring and debinarizing this project into the Gender Analysis Toolkit. Our primary intervention was the introduction of a new class of Gender objects--ones that required us to have a fundamental reworking of the full project codebase. By creating different data structures for how we find gendered language - namely, separating how we observe pronouns and gender in text - we are able to support the traditional “male/female” analysis alongside a wider variety of gender identities.
With these more robust tools, scholars will be able to find differences in how genders are represented in media/literature, hopefully opening the door for research on gender identities (or even pronoun usages!) outside of the “standard set." We will present some of these opportunities with an eye towards future collaboration, experimentation, and intervention. At CTDH ‘21, our lightning talk will address the process by which we debinarized our tool, while reflecting on implications of our work for research at scale.
Cheryl Cape and Tess Meagher, "Snapshots in Time – Using a Story Map to tell the history of the Trinity College campus"
This lightning talk highlights a story map (https://dsp.domains.trincoll.edu/campus-story-map) that documents the evolution of the Trinity College campus over time. Motivated in part by the upcoming bicentenary of the College, the story map ties imagery from aerial surveys (provided by the University of Connecticut Map & Geographic Information Center) to archival photos from Trinity’s Watkinson library, and allows users to see the evolution of the campus from its original Frederick Olmsted-designed layout to its modern configuration. Each building on campus has a description of its origin and history. The story map allows a small team (in this case, a student and an instructional technologist, with help from an archivist) to use modern geographic information systems software and detailed archival work to tell a coherent visual story of the College’s history. It also makes visible how enmeshed Trinity is with Hartford, highlighting the transformation of the campus, its built environment, and its relationship with the surrounding neighborhood. Such a project has many uses, from academic research to alumni engagement and advancement.
Sarah Theimer, "Exploring difference between English Translations of Anna Karenina"
Translations are one way that people learn about unfamiliar cultures. Creating a translation is complicated, as words often have different connotations in different cultures that must be understood and conveyed. A good translator pays attention to the style, language and vocabulary unique to the two languages.
Translators often differ when deciding how to convey the original work’s meanings, images and themes. Many prominent foreign language titles have been addressed by different translators. In the case of Anna Karenina, Constance Garnett is the most famous and commonly read translation. In “The Translation Wars” David Remick says without Garnett, the 19th century Russians would not have exerted such a rapid influence on American literature. Readers may wonder how Garnett’s translation has changed over time and how different it is from other the Anna Karenina renditions written by others translators. The goal of this ongoing project is to identify and describe some differences between translations of Anna Karenina.
This project uses English translations available through the HathiTrust Digital Library and the enhanced features capabilities provided through the HathiTrust Research Center. Using a Colab notebook, I generated a token list for each file. I then generated the Jaccard Similarity algorithm to measure the difference between sets. The Tableau dashboard created will display differences noted by critics accompanied by the differences measured through the Jaccard Similarity measure
Jacob Murel, "Building a Corpus of Early Modern Medical Texts for Word Embedding Models"
This proposed presentation relates to a present chapter of my dissertation, which deploys Word Embedding Models (WEMs) to compare early modern constructions of the human body between two corpora, medical texts and drama. More specifically, the talk discusses the theoretical and critical considerations for building a corpus of early modern medical texts designed specifically for analysis by WEMs. While Taavitsainen and Pahta have previously detailed their own process for compiling the seminal Early Modern English Medical Texts corpus (2010), their corpus, an outstanding achievement in its own right, requires fine-tuning and supplementation for analysis as a WEM corpus. Given WEMs’ focus on the use (as opposed to the mere presence) of words in a corpus, in order to gain a more accurate reflection on the circulation of medical knowledge within early English print, I propose that texts included in the WEM corpus must be “weighted” according to their prevalence in early modern England (e.g. number of editions, print runs, etc.). This lightning talk discusses my methods and rationale for weighting and classifying early modern medical texts for inclusion within my WEM corpus in light of past scholarship on the publication and readership of early modern English medical texts.
Cailin Flannery Roles, [Title Missing]
The Women Writers Project (WWP) at Northeastern University is an NEH-supported digital research and publication project focused on the recovery of early women’s writing in English for research and education. In 2020, the WWP expanded to include a new, internally-funded collaborative project, which asks whether and how digital collections of historical texts can represent racial identity. Building on the work of scholars like Kim Hall (1995), Marisa Fuentes (2016), Brigitte Fielder (2020), and Jessica Marie Johnson (2020), we address race not as a stable quality of difference but as a social category with shifting boundaries and culturally specific descriptors. Rather than simply marking the presence of women of color, a practice that reifies whiteness as the unmarked norm, this project seeks to make visible both early modern categories of race and the process of archival categorization by considering race as a critical framework for understanding early women’s writing. We hope to share these questions and our findings so far in the form of a 10-minute lightning talk presented by graduate researcher Cailin Flannery Roles of Northeastern University. Cailin will provide an overview of the project and its emerging encoding methods, using Claire de Duras’ Ourika to demonstrate the complexities of formalizing information about race. We seek feedback from our fellow DH practitioners, particularly those whose work engages critical race theory and early modern race studies, and we hope to encourage our peers to interrogate the ways our data practices obscure or essentialize representations of race.
