We'll be interested in seeing how certain labels wax or wane, considering the many factors that cause them to (appear to) wax or wane, and perhaps connecting them with theories about some developments or changes in rhetorical theory. (For example, is "eloquence" connected with rhetoric in one episteme but with delivery in another? Do certain terms appear more or less often in close proximity to one another in certain kinds of texts than others? Is "memory" connected with classical oratory in one episteme, but with vernacular writing in another? And so on.) We'll be particularly interested in terms of Enlightenment thinking, or terms that foreshadow Enlightenment thinking for the texts that we read.
However, we will be just as interested in the possibilities and limitations (i.e., constraints) of these tools, since tracking terms is a finite exercise that can lead to more imaginative activities or re-orientations to what we read, but that's where the critical work really is.
In a way, what we are doing is a very primitive form of algorithmic or topic modeling, and the only thing preventing us from doing full-out topic modeling is that this is quicker and requires fewer installs and much less from us in terms of technical skill.
Here are our tools and tasks:
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts. We'll be using the digital concordance, which calculates “counts” on search terms in order to show their proximity to other terms and/or to each other within a single text.
- Navigate to the concordance. (This is also linked from our Resources for Study page.)
- If you have never visited Alex before, I recommend browsing around to get a sense of its coverage. I also highly recommend visiting the “About” page to learn more about its origins, developments, and use, and also to learn more about how you will interpret your search results.
- We are in search of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning (and this is primarily because you are familiar with these texts and there are areas of overlap with Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric, but POR is for some reason not in the database). You can find each text at a time, browsing by “author” or “title,” or you can type the full title into the search bar.
- Once you are on the title page for Wollstonecraft's or Bacon's text, under “Services” select “evaluate using concordance,” change the radius to “500” (or higher) in order to increase the number of characters surrounding the context of your search term, and enter your key term in the search box (see terms below).
- For alternate views, click “show map” and “Visualize results,” changing the parameters of the visualization if you wish, and clicking on “usage tips” or “matrix” for help with the visualizations.
- Play around -- have fun!
- Spend time searching each text for one of the sets of terms below, taking note of what you find, and some of the differences between and among your findings. Note the number of “counts" you get for each of your terms and comment on anything else that strikes you:
- Virtue, civility, rhetoric, grammar, logic, history
- Perception, learning, writing, language, philosophy
- Science, reason, sensation, passion, education
- Passion, mind, body, state, strength, nature, project
Internet Archive. We'll be using the digital text repository at Internet Archive (which is, in many ways, an Internet aggregator), to do something similar to concordance searching, and this is out of sheer necessity. We're in search of a full online version of Vico's The New Science of Giambattista Vico, and the only one resides here.
- Navigate to the Archive.
- Once there, type in the full title for The New Science of Giambattista Vico. This is not the treatise we are reading in class, but it is the only searchable treatise available, so it will suffice for this exercise. Select “read online” to open up an e-reader, and once the book is “open” in digital form, you can type in any term on the search bar.
- Try the same set of terms as above, and just make note of what you can about how and where they appear, whether they appear in conjunction to each other, and anything else that strikes you.
Google Ngram Viewer. Because I would be remiss in not including this as a "distant reading" tool, even though I think the tool tells us far less than needed, and we have to infer a lot. Still, it raises interesting possibilities for studying the waxing and waning of terms, labels, disciplinary placeholders, and the like.
- Navigate to the Viewer.
- Take a moment to read "About Ngram Viewer" so that you know how to interpret your results.
- Set parameters for starting and ending dates, with the understanding that you are setting parameters for dates of published texts, since this is essentially mining the Google Books repository for things printed between those dates.
- Feel free to change smoothing to show less or more detail in the graph.
- Finally, enter in your string of search terms (or your single search term, if you'd like) separated by commas. You may feel free to use a set of terms from above; or, if you're more interested in tracking the waxing and waning of particular theorists or historical figures, then use their names or the titles of their texts as your search terms. Go wild. Take note of whatever you can notice.
Writing/Composing This Up
You may report your results in any way that makes the most sense to show the waxing and waning of key terms, theorists, and historical figures; to report patterns and occurrences, disappearances or omissions, surprises; and etc. I say this not to increase your anxiety but to remove it. Seriously, find a way to present the results of your searching that points to a compelling realization about how language moves through these digital tools (or doesn't), and how names and labels may move through these tools (or not).
Feel free to consider the affordances and limitations of one tool over another, or how they might work together. Feel free, also, to consider what kinds of reading practices or historical queries each one encourages, or obscures. And finally, feel free to consider what other kinds of critical or imaginative possibilities you note in using these tools.
Please upload the results of your search to our shared Google Drive space by the beginning of class time on Tuesday, September 24, and bring a hard copy to class for our discussion (just in case).
For your follow-up critical blog post (which you will do individually), please reflect on the assignment and how some aspect of the task illumined/complicated/addressed/extended your reading of our texts for this week. As before, this critical blog post is somewhat formal, rather than a simple reflection. It should be a minimum of 2-3 well developed paragraphs in length (a couple of screens), and my great desire is to see you engage expertly with both task and texts, at times speaking through or alongside what we read, and speaking with some sophistication about what we read (citing where necessary and embedding links where relevant). Be sure to define terms and unpack assumptions for us, using your posts as occasions to teach. Because the blog is somewhat performative, I'll ask you to title your posts creatively (or insightfully). Feel free to compose your post as a response to someone else’s, if you see an interesting conversation starting on the blog.
Also as before, let's make the critical blog post due by 2:00 p.m. Thursday, September 26 -- giving you an additional 48 hours to reflect.
I'll arbitrarily suggest the following working teams:
- Ashley and Sarah
- Abe and Megan R.
- Erin, Jennifer, and Jessica
- Kendall and Megan K.
- Jason and Kyle
