Here’s a link to Adrien Piper’s exhibition at the MoMA. Like I mentioned in class, I think themes of black inscription & curation in white spaces is captured really aptly here. Thematically, there’s also a lot overlapping with Rankine (in terms of addressing microaggressions, technology, and the historical/self-self). If you have a chance definitely check it out!
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3924
The students become the teachers…
Brathwaite writes “X/Self” with a hyper consciousness of language, medium, and genre. He plays with the Sycorax Video Style in order to reorganize constructs of the colonized and the colonizer, the teacher and the student, the Prospero and Caliban dialectical. These binaries are normally authoritative, contradictory roles which would create a limitation into the depth of which he could delve into the other. He seems to, between these two faces of the speaker in the poem, and “mamma” create a conversation that is cognizant of the fading border between computation and poetics in a tech-driven post-colonial framework. All of the binaries he tackles are based on a need appropriate poetic authorship: he needs Caliban to deconstruct the elitist sphere of technology, but he needs Prospero to have access to it; he needs Caliban in order to speak truthfully but he needs Prospero to speak the language of the computer. This is an ongoing conversation that goes on with himself throughout the poem, and in having this conversation Brathwaite shapes the text and molds the style into an Ars Poetica constructed of the Post-Colonial, Digital vernacular; it is a poem about the poetry of diasporic computation.
Contextualized as a letter to the speaker’s mamma, the diasporic element is established immediately, and the name- and placelessness of the speaker—replaced by an X in the title—highlight both a universality and rejection of oppression. “X” is referential to other inscriptive traditions: we saw in Faulkner that “X” was used to sign when one was illiterate, in the case of Malcom X it represents the rejection of colonial destruction and identification, it also evokes a mathematical equation or puzzle, or even a mark on a map (X marks the spot on a treasure hunt). As Leah pointed out, he plays with the pun of “writely” and “rightly” when he explains to his mom why he has named the poem in this way (84). This switching of words doesn’t simply emphasize the meta-commentary on poetry and inscription, but conversely complicates what “right” or “rightly” may mean. It evokes the sense that his position, writing the poem is morally right, it also evokes the sense that it is a write of a human nature have inscriptive control in this way when he sheds his identity; ironically for the letter “X” which, again, is a symbol of a lack of written literacy. All of which comes back into the context of his discussion of what it means as a diasporic subject to participate in elitist forms of art and technology whilst attempting to undermine their oppressive control over his body and inscription.
The genre of the poem as a letter also calls becomes a critique of genre and a commentary on diasporic technology and poetics. The letter as a genre within colonial and slave era writing as contraband, as one of the sole mediums of permitted writing, and as an often-disregarded medium within the literary canon due to its generally colloquial, practical, or otherwise non-literary purpose. He uses the letter as the framework for his poem and his venture into the diasporic territory of the white-male-dominated territory of the computer because it is a reminder of oppressed routes, and of the presumed illegitimacy of literary forms that are not traditionally canonized. Yet the computer and the letter, though at odds with each other—one modern, one ancient–become a unified object, and in that synthesis become poetry regardless of the words he writes to mamma. He compares this strange marriage of genres to numerous poets. First to Ovid, perhaps referencing a metamorphosis of inscriptive means, and a pinnacle of poetic accomplishment (80). Secondly, the adoption of the Prospero language, and therefore the creation of the Caliban/Prospero Dialectical references the work of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is an especially interesting subject for comparison since numerous literary voices throughout history—as early as Margaret Cavendish and as recent as Adrienne Rich—have commented on the pervasive genderlessness of Shakespeare’s writing, his balance between the feminine and masculine literary performance. The juxtaposition of the letter and the computer can be seen as a parallel feminine/masculine binary, and the colonized/colonizer (Caliban/Prospero) language that Brathwaite writes the poem in and about is mediated with similar aplomb by the speaker.
The poem then becomes much larger than a letter to his mamma or an experiment with new technology. It is equal parts a post-colonial critique and an examination of poetry itself within the no-mans land of the genre Brathwaite has created for himself as the context of the poem. His examination of poetry within the poem is unanswered; it is itself and open ended question from mamma, and no solid answers, only comparisons and mediations in language in form. Appropriately, the more existential nature of this Ars Poetica is finished with a question in the void of Sycorax, “why is dat?” and “what it mean?” (87). The questions no poet – let alone the poets navigating every binary of their identity and space – could answer.
In his poem “X/Self’s Xth Letters from the Thirteen Provinces”, Brathwaite makes vernacular, form, and computation indistinguishable. It is Patois, but it is also computer code, it is also internet slang, it is also poetry. Irregular line breaks can’t be told apart from bits of text, sentence fragments, typos, or stanzas. Brathwaite’s poem inhabits a space that, based on Western notions of language hierarchies, represents a lower class of inscription and yet the inscription of the patois is in the largely white, colonized space of the computer. These intersections create an indistinguishable space, which forces us to question where language intersects with heritage and race and where both of those intersect with the universal language of computation. Brathwaite continues to evoke the robotic, creating a sense of refraction from himself and his own language from the inhuman, electronic mode of his writing. His patois contrasted with the cold robotics of the computer and robots creates an odd space of humanity and legitimacy for Patois when interacting with the artificially intelligent.
There are two direct references to robots: he name-drops R2-D2 and he verbalizes the language of the robots going “bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep into de peloponnesian war.” Robots are an object which, like Patois, embody a strange middle-space between white-creation and white-rejection. Patois is the result of a language partly forced upon them by colonizing powers, partly adopted and reimagined. Robots and AI similarly maintain a space that is created by white power, while also a threat in its embodiment of creativity. The speaking robot that arrives at the conclusion of the “peloponnesian war” exemplifies this: it has no “real” or decipherable language, and yet its reference point goes back to history of classical antiquity. The robot’s intelligence is a threat because it is grounded in history and in fact, but is dangerous because it is indecipherable and therefore impossible to wield by its creator. Similarly, Patois comes to embody a similar code; it is simultaneously a human language while it appears via the technology through which it is written like a component of computer-code. Similar to the robot, the narrator’s Patois and thought are grounded in the references to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Within these references, there is a sense of adoption and translation; the inhuman beeps and Patois are both claiming intellectual knowledge of events that would, by racist and colonialist powers, be denied from them as being of too high-intellect, or historically irrelevant to colonized people. This ties into Eurocentric education, or rather the systemic denial of education in order to subjugate colonized subjects. In the poem, this tradition is undermined by the re-telling of history in a language indiscernible to colonizers. The claiming of this history and therefore cultural-capital within the poem again asks for a questioning of what language and history bears on humanity.
The comparison between Patois and the robotic is created only to be simultaneously dispelled in the poem. Robots and technology simultaneously embody the pinnacle of human achievement and the lowest level of humanity; it takes the smartest human to create artificial intelligence, but the robot created can never be human. This is the same perspective adapted by colonizing powers who claim to be on a quest to “humanize” their subjects, while creating structures and laws (both de jure and de facto) that make it impossible for subjects to be considered legitimate and human at the same rank that their colonizers consider themselves. Robots embody the inhuman: their intelligence is artificial, it is imitative, the linguistics of human-AI interaction is inherently subjugating. While Patois is indisputably human and legitimate, similar arguments are used by colonizing powers to discredit it. Much like discussions of the discrediting of black intelligence we engaged earlier this semester, a colonizer may argue that Patois is not its own language but a failure to imitate English, they may say that this indicates the artificiality of its speakers’ intelligence, and they may impose their own inability or choice not to learn it as evidence to minimize speakers’ legitimacy as intellectual humans. These dehumanizing tactics result in the same subjugation in robots and in non-white, colonized subjects who speak patois and languages like it. To go off on a tangent there has been writing done about how the very nature of our AI assistants are linguistically designed and named to embody who white structures most wish to control: the exotic and the female. The creation and colonization of the robot mirrors the purposeful creation and subjugation of speakers of Patois.
Yet the comparison to the robotic, which is embodied through explicit textual references which were mentioned earlier, as well as in Brathwaite’s method of inscription, and the visual cues suggesting the inhuman nature of typography, create an important divide between robotics and patois: those who speak Patois are human, and the robots are not. As a metaphor, the comparison works because at the end of the day—by the definition of metaphor to compare two unlike or incomparable things—we are reminded that robots and speakers of Patois, or other Creoles, are unquestionably different. An actual comparison of the two draws attention to the dangerous levels to which colonial powers have dehumanized language and monopolized technology. The placement of Brathwaite’s poetry into this robotic space simultaneously compares the struggles of colonization and otherness, while juxtaposing the fluidity and humanity of patois to the unyielding nature of technology as designed by white, owning structures. It represents another instance of white “progress” instead becoming an exclusionary limitation to the inscription of Patois.
Hansen, MBN. Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing. University of Michigan, 2000. (Monograph)
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Refiguring the Posthuman.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, 2004, pp. 311–316. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40247415.
McPherson, Tara. “Why Are the Digital Humanities so White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, CUNY Grad Center, 2012, dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29.
Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. Routledge, 2002.
Parham, Marisa. “Without Innovation: African American Lifeworlds and the Internet of Things,” October 14, 2014.
Wright, M. M. “Finding a Place in Cyberspace: Black Women, Technology, and Identity.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 26 no. 1, 2005, pp. 48-59
So far, I’m finding a lot of scholarship regarding the same intersections I want to examine in my paper. Debates in DH, has been an especially good resource for articles and following paper trails to related scholarship. I am still searching for criticism specifically tied to Rankine’s critique of technology in Citizen, but haven’t found anything yet. The texts above have some grounding in post-structuralism, but definitely aren’t driven by it (excluding Technesis). This should work out nicely for me, as there’s enough to contextualize my application of this criticism to primary texts without having limitations of any already solidly formed discussion.
I first read Native Son my sophomore year of high school, and a few months later read Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son.” At the time, I didn’t see so much of a resemblance between them besides in the name, so I felt compelled to re-read Baldwin’s piece again as I read Wright’s novel now for our class. While Baldwin does not spend time critically examining Wright in his personal essay, he examines the trauma inevitably inherited in the black body. While the critique is not explicit, it is clear that Baldwin writes “Notes…” to re-examine the shortcomings of Wright’s novel in the exploration of the authentic Black, male experience. Using Baldwin’s essay as a lens, the idea of “transcendence” and the grotesque depiction of Bigger’s self became a compelling backdrop for the novel.
The idea of transcendence from inscribed racial identity arises as a central theme in all of the above writings. The trauma of blackness, of being assigned and suffocated by an identity that does not correlate with the way one sees themself, and a matter of whether or not and how they are able to overcome that, is the determinant issue of Native Son. Bigger cannot transcend the identity of violence, crime, and thuggishness, that is ascribed to him by society. This relates to Baldwin’s recollections of his father and of himself in “Notes.” He addresses an obvious sense of erosion on the psyche and a hyperawareness of the white structure imposing identity and sparking an innate fight response observable in Bigger. Baldwin inherits it from his father, whereas Bigger is fatherless in the book. Baldwin controls it and wields this trauma into a full self-understanding. Bigger on the other hand, has glimpses of his double-consciousness but is never able to move beyond his fragmented identity; instead, Bigger embraces it. Bigger embodies Bordieu’s principal of “symbolic violence,” the sense that when one’s race, class, or gender role has been so sturdily inscribed upon them, they experience a sense of internal violence, and ultimately surrender to the role they are given by society. This internal violence, and the inability to transcend this inaccurate label, culminates in outward violence to compensate for Bigger’s internal battles. Bigger accepts his role and to justify this acceptance to himself, seeks power in it. This culminates in a complicated meta-performance of his race: Bigger performs his race because it has been place upon him with such force, and in doing so violently, rejects the white structure that created him. The temporary strength he finds in molesting and murdering Mary falls apart when he faces the wrath of the white society that made him. In adopting this identity, and blaming his crimes on it, Bigger seems to suggest it is insurmountable.
Wright seals Bigger’s fate in part by making him grotesque: his appearance does not correlate with his thoughts, his behavior appears disconnected from his will, his family (he is notably fatherless), work, and living conditions make him a walking stereotype. These disconnects scramble his identity, and Bigger then cannot find unity within his identity and therefore cannot be grounded and in control of his body. There is clearly a divide between Bigger’s consciousness and his physicality. This grotesquery is reflected in his inability to communicate with others. For example, when Bigger realizes he no longer wants to rob Mr. Blum, his internal feelings no longer correlate with his external of the “thug” or the “criminal” inscribed upon him by white society. Because his internal and external identities don’t match up, he can only resort to violence as an expression. Later, when Mary and Jan press him to eat with them he resorts to angry grumblings and does so again when he sees Bessie there. He is caught in a bind where his physical and emotional relationship with Bessie is rejected when Mary and Jan insert themselves into his identity and force him to, in a sense, break bread with them. His sitting with them for a meal comes across as the extension of white-savior olive branch which, instead of mending the divide cause by the racial binary, only serves to fragment it further by complicating Bigger’s understanding of his internal and external identities in relation to their whiteness and Bessie’s nearby Blackness. This fragmentation, making Bigger all the more grotesque, makes transcendence impossible for him. Because he cannot reconcile his internal, psychological trauma with the identity inscribed upon his physical body, Bigger cannot shed superficial racial designations as the basis of his identity; he is doomed as a grotesque stereotype of Black-maleness. Baldwin then rejects the book in his other criticism because it paints the black body as an irrevocably damaged entity. Native Son begs one to look at the repercussions of oppression yet fails give credit to the nuances of Black humanity beyond the superficial labels created by white power structures.
P.S. I also read this article in the New York Times and found it an interesting supplement to my thought about the discourse between Wright and Baldwin:
Technology and the erasure of Black, female inscription
For my final project, I’m planning to examine the intersection of technology and Black, female inscription. I am hoping to examine how historically, women have been institutionally excluded from controlling their own narratives, and therefore, perceptions of their identities. I want to look at how the expansion of digital platforms has affected Black women’s abilities to narrate their own lives. I’m not sure if this is too broad, but I hope to continue narrowing my focus as I find more sources.
I am undecided about how far back in history I want this discussion to start. I think there is definitely material to make an argument that not just digital technology as we understand it in the 21st century affects inscription, but early writing technology (which we explored through Hager’s discussion of women’s contraband letter-writing in slavery), and how the tools and surfaces that were largely improvised during this time indicate technological creativity and innovation to bolster women’s voices. Moving way ahead in time, I would like to examine how DH and current tech platforms foster and/or disrupt Black female voices – this comes partly from the article by Risam I read earlier in the semester, as well as in Citizen (which I have not read yet, but based on reading reviews of it, there seems to be a strong theme of technology).
In addition, I would like to explore the larger implication so technology and inscription as an institutional force against the Black female body in America. This is partly inspired by the novel Push by Sapphire, and by Sarah Chinn’s book, Technology and the Logic of American Racism. I think the issue of present-day technology poses both the means to escape this oppression, as well as the means for those in power to reinforce their dominance. As we’ve discussed numerous times in class, the ability to write is often decidedly the difference in one’s agency, and ability to distinguish their own history. In a similar way that I examined Douglass’ work earlier in the semester, I want to look at what It means for Black women to intersect with, and potentially subvert, the structures that oppress their right to inscribe themselves, instead of being inscribed upon. I think that as technology and digital platforms become the primary means by which Americans communicate, it is also the primary means to subjugate those who have been historically marginalized.
Chinn, Sarah E. Technology and the Logic of American Racism: a Cultural History of the Body as Evidence. Continuum, 2000.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen. Graywolf Press, 2014.
Risam, Roopika. “Navigating the Global Digital Humanities: Insights from Black Feminism.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2016, dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/80.
Sapphire. Push. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Wright, M. M. “Finding a Place in Cyberspace: Black Women, Technology, and Identity.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 26 no. 1, 2005, pp. 48-59
Hager – Word By Word Chapters (sorry this is not properly cited)
In “playing” the novel, I think it allowed me to engage Barthes’ idea of the “readerly” versus “writerly” text and, as we discussed in class, his comparison of reading to the performance of music. Through engaging with characters and scholarship intertextually, I felt each game created a sort of microcosm of exploration within the novel. Finding creative uses for related scholarship to re-inform the stories or a character’s perspective was especially useful in raising questions and topics that, if approached in the other group with a different body of scholarly research or different stories focused on from within the text, would have potentially been overshadowed by other textual elements. For example, in Game #2, Leah incorporated research on minstrelsy into her posts as Julius, whereas as in Game #1 I researched viticulture in the South for my first post. While these research topics were clearly very different, they were similar in the sense that they were guided by loosely established themes in the novel which were able to be examined more closely/considered at all by way of playing them, and having other participants play off of them. Related, I think the other benefit to playing the novel was that it made room for simultaneous close readings of numerous figures related to the book. I find oftentimes when looking at novels like The Conjure Tales, it is easy to get wrapped up in one character so that the examination of other characters is refracted off of that one character. I felt like to an extent this happened a lot to Annie, who within the text is only given a voice through John’s narration and her interactions with him and Julius. The opportunity to see Annie played as a living, independent character within the game, forced me to re-examine what John’s feelings towards her would have been outside of what he may have narrated in the text. I found one of the most fun moves I made was that in which I responded to Chesnutt as John; similarly to the phenomenon of Annie being narrated by others in the text, Chesnutt as the author is hidden within the text, so to have Gabi play Chesnutt and assert an elucidation of his motives as writer, and to have John—his own character—respond was a playful way to continue an examination of how and why he wrote the characters the way he did. I think ‘playing” the novel, rather that firmly researching it, or simply reading it, opened up a method for understanding the novel that was simultaneously serious and pressure-free; accuracy and research were certainly the base for the moves, but it was fun to explore paths of the text without the weight of scholarly accuracy, and instead with the goal to engage in an examination rooted in curiosity.
I would say that at times my point of view felt much more limited by playing as John because his point of view is very solid in the text, so I couldn’t go too far out of those bounds in examining his character within Chesnutt’s writing. While other characters including Julius, Chesnutt, and even Annie could examine the text and their roles in a more progressive or modern way, I felt that I was confined to a more problematic and often racist view of things. That being said, I still felt it was valuable to try to figure out what a man like John would have thought about the The Conjure Tales in light of Chesnutt’s mission to write it within the plantation fiction genre in order to subvert that genre unwittingly to a reader like John. Playing from his role did however force me to examine John as a more nuanced character than one might want to give him credit for if reading casually. For example, John is thrifty and economical in moving to the South just after the civil war, his hope to start a vineyard in an area that isn’t known for wine represents his quintessentially American, entrepreneurial spirit and symbolizes him as a sort of trail blazer, or the new generation of white southern man. John is also originally from the North and thinks himself progressive, so I was able to examine, compare, and contrast John’s view of himself to his behavior toward Annie, Julius, and others. I think this could have led to an interesting historical/political discussion amongst the characters which would have added context to our reading of the novel as sort of a political artifact. For example, as I mentioned in class, I wished I’d had the time to write a post researching the forced end and failure of reconstruction in the South, which goes unmentioned in the text but coincided with its publication. All this being said, I think my exploration of John’s limited perspective on the novel was useful in digging deeper into a character who, while not the most likable, is very important in framing Chesnutt’s commentary on the racial atmosphere at the time.
Were I to play this again, I don’t think I would change my character, but would instead like to play for longer and change how I approached playing the game. I felt like the more posts that got published, the more interesting the game play was because there was more to read and respond to. As I said, I felt one of the benefits of playing the novel was that there could be a more equitable standing for characters and para-textual figures to contribute, but earlier in the game when people were still researching their moves, there weren’t always posts to respond to. I think by lengthening the time spent playing the game people would have more time to get comfortable with their roles, and more time could be spent having meaningful interactions in the game. Additionally, if I were to play again, I would want to have more interaction outside of the posts in-character, so that we could be clearer on each other’s intentions for our posts. In my post where John has a dream, for example, I wanted to write a post that Annie, Julius, or even Chesnutt could respond to. I think it would have been a more useful post had I discussed with my peers playing those roles and seen what their perspectives were first, so that their interpretations of their characters and the events could have been more present in my depiction of John, and so that it could have been a more collaborative space for them to get involved and respond to my post.
On a final, technical note, I felt like the Ivanhoe interface works for the game, but I wished it was a little more forgiving in terms of posting. I think a tool to edit posts and rationales would have been especially useful and would have perhaps assuaged some nervousness in posting by eliminating the finality of it. In addition, I think it might be good to have responses to posts show up both independently (as they do now) on the game page, but also show up as a thread under the posts which they are responding to. I think this would visually and organizationally create a more collaborative feeling around the game, by more explicitly showing the discourse between characters and posts, and by allowing for people to continue these conversations more as comments that as fully-fledged posts. I thought of this, for example, when Kaela responded to one of my posts by having Annie leave a quick, short comment on my post. Having the option to leave comments of this nature on people’s posts and have them appear as a thread instead of formal, individual posts, would allow for more conversational, authentic interactions between players and would probably improve overall communication and collaboration during game play.
A lot of our discussions revolving around slave narratives in class have been centralized on questioning who has the power to tell their own stories. With this in mind, I also began to think about who has the power to ask for things, and how, verbally, things asked for. Slaves are often commanded more than they command, so I thought it would be interesting to see what the trends across the corpus referring to words revolving around asking for things. With this in mind, I put in the terms “ask*” “demand*” and “beg*”. These words seemed to represent three different sides of power in making requests: “ask” is neutral, “demand” suggests power, whereas “beg” suggests subjugation. I chose these words over other synonyms like “request” because I felt the three words I picked were simple, and “beg” and “demand” explicitly connote a position of power when used as opposed to ask. I felt other words would be too similar to “ask” in the sense that they don’t impose an identity on the speaker as much and wouldn’t answer my question about the relationship between “asking” and power. To analyze the data I primarily used the graph projection on Voyant to look at how the word overlapped across all of the slave narratives in the corpus. I found that all three of the words were found in a lot of the same documents, but at different rates.
When they were plugged in, “ask” and “beg” appeared in much higher frequencies throughout the narratives than demand. This represented a few things to me, the first was that it reaffirmed the lack of power the slaves had. In first-person slave narratives, in makes sense that the word “demand” would not come up frequently because slaves did not have the power to demand much from anyone. Going in, I thought the word may have come up more frequently because it would be used to describe an owner’s demand, but still the numbers were so low that they don’t even overlap with “ask” and “beg” much of the time. Furthermore, it forced me to question if the characteristics of the word “demand” also made it scarce throughout the corpus; demand is two syllables, instead of one, and 6 letters instead of three. This may have made it more difficult for a marginally-literate person both to read and spell, and therefore less frequently used.
The terms “ask” and “beg” showed up at very similar rates and overlap frequently. One can see however, that “ask” has more spikes in frequency than “beg”, which stayed relatively stable throughout the corpus. I found this interesting because initially I was worried that the word “ask” would be too generic (it is used much more commonly as a non-connotative speech tag, unlike the other words) and throw off results and ability to decipher power balances in these narrative because of this. That thought ended out making it even more interesting at how similar the frequencies between “beg” and “ask” were, suggesting that while “ask” was almost definitely used in the more automatic/generic way, “beg” was used almost as often and most likely very explicitly. From this, it is also possible that in the eyes of the writers, “ask” and “beg” were seen as being more interchangeable than “ask” and “demand”. Again, this affirms the level of suppression represented in the texts; they lack bargaining power and therefore the act of asking is more dire and desperate, like “begging.” In the context of the writings, it also raises the question of connotations. We know, for example, that very few writers of these narratives explicitly report the hardships of slavery in favor of addressing other topics, and yet connotations of the words used can help surmise their oppression. I wonder if the word “beg” can be found as one of those connotative words, where, perhaps they are not using it in a context of pleading for something from someone who has power over them, but are perhaps using it in other less literal contexts, maybe they are “begging” a woman to go out, “begging” a horse to do labor. In this sense, I really appreciate the distant reading practice, because it allows for us to examine words that we may not have paid attention to, or would have only noticed the denotation if we were skimming over it in a context that didn’t evoke the traditional sense of a given word, “beg,” in this example.
This exercise was a fun way to quantify my understanding of power that I already had from close readings. I found that exploring how the relationships between these words across thousands of texts was meaningful in understanding how diction shapes storytelling and power across the board, even when a word like “ask” may be without an explicit connotative purpose within an individual text. I would say a pitfall of the process is that when a corpus is so expansive, there isn’t as much room to dig deeper and do close reading based off of findings, which would further an understanding of the context in which the words are used. I would also say that a weakness is that when the corpus is so large, it can be hard to really see the points and changes because they are so jumbled on the graph—though, to be fair, this is more a problem with the Voyant software than with the research process. I think this would be an interesting method to pursue with common misspellings of words examined through close readings or to enhance close readings by showing the connection between a word that may seem insignificant in a solitary text by demonstrating its significance throughout an entire corpus.
I thought this may be of interest to the class. It uses Black Feminist critical theory as a framework for looking at how DH can be globalized equitably to include voices other than the dominant white/Western ones. The Black Feminist theory Risam references has very Gates-ian elements, and the grander mission of the article to search for ways of putting agency in the hands of people (via DH) connects with some guiding questions about inscriptive power we’ve been discussing in class.
Credit goes to Professor Allred for directing me to this publication! If you’re interested in DH it’s a really expansive resource for discussion of what’s going on in that world.
