This panel draws inspiration from a rich and growing scholarly conversation on the intersection between literature, cultural studies, data, and computational methodologies, exemplified by such texts as Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold’s Humanities Data in R: Exploring Networks, Geospatial Data, Images, and Text, Daniel Shore’s Cyberformalism: Histories of Linguistic Forms in the Digital Archive, and the edited collection The Digital Black Atlantic. These studies have made groundbreaking advancements in developing both theoretical and practical frameworks for synthesizing humanistic and computational research. My panel takes up their urgent call for producing more scholarship on fine-grained applications of data-driven readings of specific authors, time periods, and geographic regions. Moving across Europe, the UK, the classroom in China, and different localities within Afro-Caribbean networks, these papers demonstrate an impressive range of quantitative approaches to literary analysis and collectively enhance our understanding of data science as a friendly ally to humanistic inquiry.
To allow for a capacious exploration of diverse historical and cultural perspectives, I have selected four presenters who will speak for 13 minutes each. Lisu Wang begins by examining the concepts of physical and ideological travel in Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1864 hybrid text French Life, which incorporates elements of autography, travelogue, and fiction and integrates a housewife’s domestic role with a writer’s desire for mobility. Referencing a Parisian map from the historically proximate A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Wang plots textual representations of Gaskell’s routes through GIS (geographic information system) techniques to offer a cartographical vision of the writer’s spatial data noted in her travelogue. Wang argues that such mappings visualize how Gaskell challenged Victorian gender and social structures by traveling as a radical act while maintaining the perfect disguise of a domestic angel.
Dr. Jeffrey Clapp builds on this discussion of the unconventional application of data analysis to canonical texts by reporting on the results of a Hong Kong-based community reading project. Over several semesters, students in Dr. Clapp’s introductory Digital Humanities course have hand-coded the social networks of the 15 stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), producing network data and visualizations for co-occurrence, mentions, and dialogue exchanges among characters. Dr. Clapp discusses how students can benefit from (and even find joy in!) considering whether data-centric evidence confirms or disconfirms literary critics’ claims about Dubliners, theorizing these observations with reference to recent discussions of literary theory (Moretti) and pedagogy (Felski).
Considering the challenges of machine-learning transcription, tagging, and analysis in unearthing significant but fraught texts, Nicholas Sabo analyzes the radio career of the Puerto Rican actor Juano Hernandez. Best known for his performance as Lucas Beauchamp in the film adaptation of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1949), Hernandez was one of the most prolific Black actors in the New York radio scene. Sabo specifically examines the perpetuation of racist stereotyping and the relationship between early data aggregation systems used for radio advertisement and contemporary data harvesting, uncovering Hernandez’s anti-segregation ethos through a curated timeline of clips, transcripts, and related information in a proof-of-concept experiment.
Finally, Dr. Warren Harding examines how databases can narrate the ways in which Black cultural producers enact “bearing witness” and “holding space” in his talk “Citational Resonances.” Drawing upon his work conducted as a Diversity in Digital Publishing Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University, Dr. Harding will share insights and progress on creating a digital repository of Caribbean feminist writing from the late twentieth century. He will reflect on the central questions, structure, scope, and challenges to coordinating this collaborative, public-facing project, paying particular attention to how Caribbean migrant women use their creative expressions to develop spaces that interrogate meanings for belonging, both on and beyond the page.