Reinventing Traditions, or, “tschüss, Schoenhof’s!”

It is probably normal to have some kind of routine in cities one visits often. Whenever I’m in LA, I try, like every non-local, to duck into an In-N-Out for a grilled cheese animal style. If I’m lucky, I try to hit the In-N-Out by the Museum of Jurassic Technology, so I can let the food digest while I enjoy my favorite museum in the world. In Toronto, I always try to get a slice of the pizza arrabiatta at King Slice.

My Boston tradition was to go to Schoenhof’s, a foreign bookstore in Cambridge, that has been a sort of playground for me since middle school. It’s a special place; the store occupies some three rooms in the basement of a building on Mount Auburn, and it’s just bleeding books in dozens of different languages. They even have lots of children’s books there–I got Asterix and Tintin books there, as well as the Lithuanian translation of the fifth Harry Potter book, Haris Poteris ir Fenikso brolija. But though I’m in Boston often, I seldom have the free time to go to Schoenhof’s, so I’ve limited it to when I go to high school reunions. Five years ago, I spent over $300 at the bookstore, picking up all sorts of books I probably didn’t need (like Kracauer and Freud in German).

For this reunion, I was worried I’d repeat a $300 order. So when I found the website to see if the store still existed, I saw that they offered free shipping on orders over $50. There doesn’t exist a non-English book that I need right away (they are more or less definitionally a luxury to me), so I promised myself that I’d only buy one book this time. And that book would be Viktor Pelevin’s Generation “П.”¹ Of course they had it in their Russian section, so I grabbed it. Without even thinking,  I flipped it over to see the price.

$44.95.

For an unspectacularly bound and printed popular novel. I had never really looked at the prices of Schoenhof’s books, because growing up they were the only show in town. But considering I had just bought Pelevin’s ЧАПАЕВ и ПУСТОТА online four months earlier, published by the same house, for about $15, I had to put the book back on the shelf. In desperation, I cast about for another possible book, but I could not find Мастер и Маргарита, and I was so upset that I couldn’t really think or look hard any more.²

So this is the reinventing a tradition. Paying $45 for a Russian novel is absolutely untenable, when Amazon will set me up with a firm like RusKniga, which will sell me the novel at a fraction of the cost. And that’s too bad, since there was a time when Schoenhof’s would fill me with wonder and envy. I considered it a treat to even set foot in there, much less leave with a book. Now, since I’m old and cranky, all I see are price differences.

There are, of course, still reasons to go to Schoenhof’s: browsing itself is worth the effort, especially with so many opportunities for a surprise title (like Haris Poteris!). And there’s something to be said about paying a premium because of how nice the store is and so on. If the Pelevin had cost about $20, I probably would have bought it…

But the damage is also done. Next thing, the MJT will close. Then King Slice will also close. Then I suppose I’ll just stop travelling.

Incidentally, I bought Generation “П” via Amazon, though not through RusKniga. A day later, my friend writes me with tips about spending time in Moscow, where I’ll be in less than a week:  “the only things worth buying in Moscow are books,” he explains. So I guess I simply couldn’t win. Though what I’ve read of Pelevin I’ve liked enough to want to buy more of his books, so that may make up my Moscow souvenirs.

1. I actually have a list of French books I’d like to buy, but, for obvious reasons, it makes sense to wait until I’m, you know, in France, to buy them. [↩]
2. I did, however, have the ups to price check the Tintin books, and they’re about the same as what Amazon would give. [↩]

Tags: Asterix, books, Harry Potter, In-N-Out, King Slice, Museum of Jurassic Technology, polyglot, schoenhofs, Tintin, Viktor Pelevin

[I'm not entirely sure why I'm turning this into a post. It's essentially my final project for my Advanced GIS class. I think it's rather provocative, however, and it shows a few immediate possible further directions for analysis.]

In my earlier geospatial analysis of the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos, I decided that I was unsatisfied with my initial findings regarding the distribution of some data points within the United States.¹ This project attempts to refine the analysis, so that I may see if I can make bolder statements about how events in the text are distributed. To do this, I enhanced the “Average Nearest Neighbor” analysis built into ArcGIS and did a Monte Carlo simulation two different variables to see if I could get an expected value that was closer to the observed value that I get when running the analysis on my data.

The U.S.A. trilogy, published between 1930 and 1936, is astonishingly dense with geographical information. In addition to tracking the movements of 12 different characters across four different continents, the novels include news from around the world in the “Newsreel” sections, which are made up of pasted together snippets of newspapers from the first 30 years of the 20th Century, as well as biographical portraits of 27 different influential Americans, which includes spatial data. A simple random sample of 30 pages yielded an average of 2.7–6.6 geocodable observations per page, at 95% confidence.

For my analysis, however, I decided to focus on three thematically important sections: the “U. S. A.” section, which opens the trilogy in the form of a preface to the first novel, The 42nd Parallel; “The Body of an American,” which closes the second novel, 1919; and “Vag,” which closes the final novel of the trilogy, The Big Money. These three sections, though containing fewer than ten total pages, capture Dos Passos’s desire to create a work that captures the totality of the United States and include over 70 geocodable observations, of which 50 fall within the United States of the first three decades of the 20th Century (the time of the trilogy). At the end of the first section, in fact, he ends with a paragraph of statements about what the U.S. is, beginning with “U. S. A. is the slice of a continent.” Dos Passos, however, moves from the spatial to the linguistic by closing his list, and the section, with “But mostly U. S. A. is the speech of the people”:

U. S. A. is the slice of a continent. U. S. A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a publiclibrary full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U. S. A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U. S. A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U. S. A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U. S. A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U. S. A. is the speech of the people.

An initial glance at the distribution on the map of the U.S. suggests that the points are dispersed rather widely. There seems to be some clustering near New York City, but otherwise the data is rather spread out. Zooming in on Manhattan, however, we can count three observations there, including two practically on top of each other—on opposite sides of Stuyvesant Square.

Points in the trilogy on the map. (click to enlarge)

A simple average nearest neighbor analysis of this data, however, gives a nearest neighbor ratio of .58 (114,000 m/196,000 m), for a Z score of -5.64. Despite what our eyes may suggest, this distribution shows intense clustering, with an immeasurably small p-value. The usual caveats about nearest neighbor analysis, however, apply, most notably edge effects.² Many of the points fall into metropolitan centers, which are often on the edge of the U.S., which shows a different problem.

The average nearest neighbor analysis compares the results of the dataset to a randomly distributed set of points, from which it calculates an “Expected mean distance.” But considering that my points correspond to Americans, who are not randomly distributed within the space of the U.S. (they tend to cluster in metropolitan areas and, especially in 1920, in the northeast), it makes sense that my results should show intense clustering. Might there be a way, then, I wondered, for me to change the expected mean distance and then measure my results against that?

I decided the answer would lie in weighting the distribution of the random points. If I could weight locations by their population in 1920, they would attract more points and create mini-clusters around New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles (cities in the largest counties of the time).³If I then ran this simulation a thousand times, it would create a dataset of expected mean distances that are more human-aware.

Downloading both state-level and county-level 1920 U.S. Census data from NHGIS, I started my simulations at the state level. For each state, I gave it a weight, the “Total White Population.” Weighted by this, I let the script pick a state 50 times—to correspond to the number of observations from the trilogy. Then I used ArcGIS’s “Create Random Points” function to place a point at random in each state that was chosen one of the 50 times. I then ran the average nearest neighbor analysis, recorded the observed mean distance, the expected mean distance, and the Z score. I repeated the simulation 1000 times. The results:

Nearest neighbor analysis on 1000 iterations of 50 points in the US. (click to enlarge)

                             Observed values (m)    Expected values (m)    Z score
Mean                                     182,000                196,000     -0.940
Std. Dev, (fraction of mean)      19,700 (0.108)         15,300 (0.078)       1.39
Median                                   183,000                198,100     -0.956

As we can see, on average, the points veered toward the clustered, but not significantly so. Perhaps, I reasoned, the states were simply too large an area in which to toss my random points. After all, most of my points from the U.S.A. trilogy are specific at the city level, so perhaps I should use smaller chunks of the U.S. population and toss my points at the county level. This time I used the Census’s “Total Population” data field and ran the simulation another 1000 times:

Nearest neighbor analysis on 1000 iterations of 50 points in the US. (click to enlarge)

                              Observed values (dd)    Expected values (dd)    Z score
Mean                                          1.70                    1.99      -1.91
Std. Dev, (fraction of mean)         0.214 (0.126)           0.178 (0.089)       1.49
Median                                        1.70                    2.01      -1.95

Using county-level population data, the clustering was much more intense, but still not significant at 95%. On average, the simulation gave a Z score of -1.91, just missing the threshold for 95% significance. Compare this result, again, to the -5.64 I received for the novel’s data. Also of note, however, are the larger standard deviations at the county-level, though I am not certain why that might be.

What these simulations give, however, are two sets of new expected values that I can compare to the data from U.S.A. That is, the “Observed values” above now become the “Expected values,” and I can calculate new Z scores for my trilogy’s data, based on these simulations:

Scale              Obs. U.S.A. Value    Exp. Value    Std. Dev.    New Z score
State-level                114,000 m     182,000 m       19,700          -3.45
County-level                 1.14 dd       1.70 dd        0.214         -2.616

The results are clear, although not astonishing: the trilogy’s points remain clustered, even in comparison to random points distributed with population weights, but they are far less clustered. And, more notably, the amount of clustering in comparison to the county level clustering almost pushes it outside of statistical significance.

Yet these results are still frustrating. A return to the novel’s data might serve useful here. Of the 50 points, three reference the Arlington National Cemetery, which means there are three points whose nearest neighbors are 0 away. That is intensely unlikely, even in a weighted distribution. Of the 50 points, eight are duplicates of some sort, which means that they, too, have nearest neighbors of 0. If I remove those from the stack and run the nearest neighbor analysis again with only 42 points, I get an observed value of 1.40 dd, which generates, using the same table above, a Z score of -1.40. In other words, with the duplicates removed, the points still trend toward the clustered, but they do not do so significantly at the 95% level. If I go one step further and remove one of the points referring to two places within Stuyvesant Square in New York City, the Z score falls to -1.21, getting increasingly more seemingly randomly distributed. Of course, there is a tradeoff to intentionally removing the duplicates: Dos Passos as a novelist consciously repeatedly referred to the Arlington National Cemetery (it is the focus of “The Body of an American”), but it is still interesting that he managed to create a distribution of points in these three sections that the computer suspects, when weighting for population distribution within the U.S., are randomly distributed.

There’s much more I could do with this analysis, including running the Create Random Points command with the matrix set to toss a number of points within each state and county that correspond to the states and counties mentioned (so each mention of the Cemetery would be scattered across all of Virginia, for example). I could then measure those results against the simulations. Furthermore, I could investigate the distributions created by my simulations and develop new scores for them that take into account the nature of their distributions (I did no tests to see how normal the distributions are). My suspicion is that this would only bring the Z score ever closer to 0, although I am not yet certain what the cost of that sort of analysis could be.

Alternatively, I could sample my 1000 iterations and run them through a more sophisticated bit of clustering software, like CrimeStat III. This would give me a sense of where the clusters of people are in the US (preliminary guess: NYC, Pennsylvania, New England, and the Rust Belt). I could then compare those second- and third-order clusters with the clusters I find with my data and see if there are deviations there (like, perhaps, the DC area is over-represented).

1. I showed that my points in question were more widely distributed than the population of the U.S., suggesting that Dos Passos encompassed a larger swath of the U.S. than one would have expected him to do if he was picking places to mention more attuned to the distribution of people within the U.S. in 1920. [↩]
2. Later in the analysis, I’ll address an even more remarkable effect, that of points on top of each other. [↩]
3. The script I used for weighted random choice I found on this Python discussion. I used David’s “compiling version of 2.” [↩]

Tags: digital humanities, GIS, John Dos Passos, monte carlo, nearest neighbor, statistics

[It's weird that the same week I buy something from J. Crew for the first time in some 7 years, I also stumble across this old article of mine, originally published in the Chicago Maroon on 30 September 1997. I'll wait for you to calculate its age. In a further stroke of luck, I even found the original graphic. I'm putting this up without rereading it, but know that I was tremendously proud of it 11+ years ago.]

I admit it, only reluctantly. Only among my closest friends it was once that I could calmly bear discovery of the tiny stack of magazines in the “not-books/other” section midway through my second bookcase. But then I started thinking to myself that this affliction was not really one over which to constantly grow shame. These magazines were, and are, after all, merely, J. Crew catalogs.

Never in my life have I worn a J. Crew article of clothing. Never in my life has the catalog been dropped, even on accident, in my mailbox. And never in my life have I acquired the catalog with a completely clear conscience. Usually there is a bit of subterfuge involved — say a quick survey of other building-dwellers before the catalog slips gently against my warming chest, or a later vigorous blackening with a marker of the address to which the catalog was intended (lest the Feds break down my door and drag me away for J. Crew malfeasance).

Pornography, in perhaps the loosest sense, is imagery designed to fill the consumer with a certain level of fantasy — by definition, sexual. The world within the pages of porn is designed to swell a specific sex-fantasy, leaving the consumer, sprawled over a toilet bowl, trying to interpret the fantasy in some visceral physical way.

For me, J. Crew does the same thing — except for one crucial detail: the fantasies exist as fantasies, to be sure, but there is nothing sexual about it. I do not see in the catalog women after whom I lust; I see either a nubile woman in a Rayon/cotton blend lilac cable crewneck (44564A $88), or my investment banker in his plaid flannel hunter button down (10106B $38), ready for to help coach the little league lacrosse team.

There exists a future captured within the pages of a J. Crew catalog (any J. Crew catalog) that fits rather nicely the fantasy of a future that I hold in the back of my mind. It shows comfort, ease, leisure. Clothing is often framed against a backdrop of barn doors, wooden fences, rocking chairs and old bicycles. It’s a future of the familiar, and of the comfortable.

On pages 30–31 of the Fall 1996 catalog there sits a photo above four pairs of jeans of a young couple seated on a sofa. She’s wearing a soft grass sweater (I could not find the specifics in the catalog), high-riding white shorts that look like an undergarment, and cotton/nylon denim courtside socks (92894B $8). He’s wearing a wool sweater (again I could not find the details) and the Relaxed Fit 14-wale corduroy stonewashed soft jeans with the vintage-style copper hardware and the zip fly (10626B $42). They sit at each end of the sofa, legs and feet intertwined, as she studies, hair throwntogether, the stock listings. He, on the other hand, with an almost lecherous smirk, reads the Sunday funnies. Perfect … so Perfect.

And then I flip back to the front of that catalog and look at the added cover which reads, in large print, “Our heart is in the game.” I had only read those words for the first time recently, after almost a year of casual perusal. “We take it to heart,” the passage continues, “every time we gain an admirer … or lose one. It’s such a long time since we’ve heard from you. Did we let you down somehow? If so, we’d like to make amends, and hope this credit shows you our heart is in it.” The text is superimposed over a man I’m convinced teaches history at Andover, holding a football, earnestness on his sleeve.

“Did we let you down somehow?” Oh, J. Crew, what a patently absurd question that is! Thumbing through the catalog has become near torture now — I drift off to unreachable worlds of beaches, where I casually watch, through my lightweight matte aluminum Café sunglasses (12862A $42), the Perfect walk past, women in the mini print bikini set, with the high-cut leg, slight front dip, and full back coverage (67304A $54), men in wet seven-inch inseam pleated wheat chino shorts (84623A $30), with the cotton stripe V-neck pigment printed short-sleeved jersey (4746A $28) tossed over their amazingly-tanned left shoulders. Perfect. Perfect.

“Did we let you down somehow?” I can only sigh when I close the catalog out of frustration, since this future is doomed to always be that, and never a reality. The man on page 31 does not exist, of course. So why should I want his life?

Furthermore, the mere fact that I stroll around the Midway midwinter in the Barn jacket with 150-gram Thinsulate and the quilted plaid flannel lining (95283S $98) does not guarantee the pretensions to the modestly furnished apartment 20 blocks south of Harlem on Park which has captured my imagination so fully. Looking through the catalogs is almost an exercise in guilt and depression on the level of masturbation — both leave the person yearning for a reality to fulfill the fantasy, a yearning that is both depressing since it will likely not arrive, and guilty since the person feels like such a fool for being suckered by the fantasy in the first place.

However, the lust dripping from each J. Crew page is not a lust for sex, but rather a lust for financial security and social standing. When asked what I want to do when I grow up, I often facetiously answer “marry well,” and the J. Crew catalog, with its own ego-destroying poison, is the best reminder of why it is exactly that I want to do just that.

Tags: Andover, class mobility, clothing, commodity fetish, fantasy, j. crew, materialism, pornography

As it’s the end of the quarter, it’s final project time at the university (my own final project for GIS, which involves Monte Carlo simulation(s), will hopefully start spinning its wheels this weekend). The students in Jo Guldi’s graduate class on digital history, Chris Bench and Liz Blake, had their presentations this afternoon, and I was able to attend.

The first presentation, by Chris, was about the “Imagery debate“–a debate about how it is that the mind perceives images. Chris narrows down the debate to two main protagonists, Stephen Kosslyn and Zenon Pylyshyn. Next, he compares how the two psychologists interact with each other. Using Many Eyes’ Word Tree Generator, Chris discovers that there is an imbalance in the way the two treat each other’s work, mostly in the sense that while Pylyshyn mentions Kosslyn far more, he less rarely rehearses Kosslyn’s arguments or engages him. The opposite is the case when the names are flipped.

Many Eyes provides many different sorts of visualizations for its users (including, of course, rudimentary geographical mapping software that has a human-intelligent geoparser), and Chris made a pretty intriguing point about the relationship between interlocutors which (perhaps unintentionally) moved rather nicely into the second presentation, about citation.

Liz’s primary engine for her presentation, unlike Chris’s two blog posts, was a timeline she built on xtimeline. Caveats abounded regarding the software, but it seems to be the best thing available online now, for free. Liz used the history of citation to show that there are actually many histories that continue separate to this day. She looked at how the same article, Youmans’s “A New Tool for Discourse Analysis: The Vocabulary-Management Profile,” which deals in part with Joyce (and Orwell), is handled by two different citation systems, Google Scholar and ISI’s Web of Knowledge. Furthermore, Liz pointed out that citation works completely differently in the humanities and the hard sciences. In the humanities, we’ll typically cite stuff 25 years old (and older). In the scinces, apparently, one doesn’t cite anything older than about 2 years (though these may be average times). This led me to a brief fantasy of an online index of citations of novels–like, I could instantly find out everything that cites, say, Ulysses.

Anyway, my reverie over, we then expanded into talking about citation in a larger frame, including services like Zotero, which I’ve discussed in the past. The main payoff for me was seeing how unstable the relationship between the standards requires of citation ended up being: authors were chastised for their pedantry in creating footnotes that resemble the modern citation, while others were criticized for not being specific enough. One author claimed that he didn’t need to cite his work, since it was read precisely by the people he would have cited, which reminded me of a post I read yesterday about collaboration in the humanities and its silent trace.

Tags: Chris Bench, citation, digital humanities, George Orwell, google scholar, James Joyce, Jo Guldi, Liz Blake, many eyes, Stephen Kosslyn, vizualization, Zenon Pylyshyn, zotero

In the first part of this post, I described how a lot of ways in which work in the humanities is interacting with the spatial is in the process of generating “flat maps.” That is, they reproduce what is already in the texts themselves, without pushing any analytical balls forward.

These sorts of projects engage in the creation of what Deleuze and Guattari call “tracing.” Against the tracing, they put the “map,” which is a rhizome:

What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency… The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification… [It has] multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight.

I imagine that the creators of these projects don’t see their work in this sort of negative way. Or, more importantly, they don’t care: they are creating intentionally pedagogical, not analytical, tools. That possibility makes me temper my own argument a bit, since I worry that I’m beating up on strawmen. For example, I still don’t know how to read the “too soon, far too soon” in considering GIS in one response to the Chronicle’s interest in “Literary Geospaces.” But one way or another, These sorts of projects are the very tippity tip of the possibilities available in pushing forward an actual spatial turn away from the hegemony of history in the humanities. They acknowledge that space is important. The next step is unfreezing space.

What follows is an “annotated version” of the second part of a presentation I made this week on using GIS in the humanities (pptx | video), where I actually start talking about a GIS. All links open in new windows.

Simply put, a GIS is a system (the “S”) of information (the “I”) with a geographical (the “G”) component. We interact with a GIS whenever we ask Google Maps for driving directions: Maps interacts with a network GIS that figures out how to get from one point to another and then displays that information in our browser.

The most important conceptual idea to grasp of how a GIS is different from the various projects in the earlier part of the presentation is that we can ask a GIS a question and then get an answer. This could be driving directions, or it can get more detailed, like asking, “how are median ages distributed in the 60637 ZIP code, according to the 2000 Census?” or “what kinds of governments were in Latin America over the course of the 20th Century?” or “what is the relationship between the railroad and population distribution in industrial England?”

My own question in my workshop presentation was, “how can a study of the distribution of the various points mentioned by John Dos Passos in certain sections of the U.S.A. trilogy change our understanding of his representation of the US as ‘the speech of the people‘?”

The point here is that using a GIS can open analytic entryways into understanding an object of study. A GIS begins the engine of analysis, not stops it, as a flat map does, assertions about putting the reader into a text’s “imaginative landscape” notwithstanding.

U.S.A. trilogy vs. 1920 Census data. (click to enlarge)

Creating a GIS, though, is a rather tricky–or at least time-consuming–procedure. The first part is collecting data. For my project, I had data come from two sources. The first was the U.S.A. trilogy itself, where I hand-entered geographical observations and then geocoded them (using Google Earth as my gazetteer). I matched the geographical observations against US Census data from 1920, which I downloaded from the NHGIS site. NHGIS not only offers giant data tables (spreadsheets) with historical census data, it also provides historically accurate shapefiles for each census, which allow me to represent the census data spatially along with my observations about Dos Passos. One result of the comparison is something like this map here, which contrasts the distribution of sections of the trilogy with the US population as a whole.

What kind of conclusion is immediately apparent? Dos Passos created a much more widely dispersed US than the population data from the time would have dictated. This suggests that “speech of the people” wasn’t enough of the US for him–the geographic expanse of the US was also important in how he rebuilt a US in the trilogy, which then moves the ball further toward a larger, material claim I’m making about national imagining in the novel as a genre. This kind of conclusion would be rather impossible without the use of a GIS.

Once the hurdle of data entry is met, however, the next step is using software to interact with the data. In my talk, I mentioned GeoDa, which is a free, Windows-only geostatistical application. It’s very basic in its interface, but it can do quite a bit in comparing various variables and doing regressions on the variables. A neat little program. I also mentioned Quantum GIS, a far less exciting, but still free, piece of software. It’s less exciting mostly since qgis can’t do the sorts of statistical analyses that I would like my software to be able to do. Google Earth, of course, can also be used as something like a GIS, as shown in this movie by Matthew L. Jockers that shows the distribution of Irish-American novels’ plots (breathlessly reported by the Chronicle), but it does not have a lot of the analytical tools built in that GeoDa, qgis, or other programs do.

Once money gets on the table, ArcGIS becomes the sort of gold-standard for building a GIS, despite its amazingly frustrating interface. ArcGIS is useful to learn since it can do pretty much everything, and it is a good introduction to concepts surrounding GIS. I used ArcGIS to create the map above, for example. But it’s still annoying, expensive, and often completely illogical. At least the results it generates are decent.

At the University of Chicago, there is a small GIS community growing around a few classes about using GISes and a site license for the ArcGIS software. I myself am a part/product of that community, having taken the yearlong GIS course sequence offered by the Committee on Geographical Sciences. But beyond the relationship with the Oriental Institute, this sort of spatial connection has not permeated the Division of the Humanities. That’s too bad, but it might change.

Moving from my own academic setting back into using GISes in the humanities as a whole, it becomes clear quickly that there’s not terribly much out there, especially in fields connected with literary analysis. There are tentative first steps in the work of Moretti or Jockers, but beyond that it gets somehow far too connected to historical analysis–humanities GIS often piggybacks on historical GIS, even in my own work.

But if we keep Morettis words in mind:

A good map is worth a thousand words, cartographers say, and they are right: because it produces a thousand words: it raises doubts, ideas. It poses new questions and forces you to look for new answers.

We can crack open two new dimensions of analytical approach. That sounds exciting, since it is!

There were a few additional spatial links for the Humanities that I did not include in my presentation, but that I think could give possible avenues for future work.

• GIS & the Humanities from Stanford’s library page. I’m not surprised that two of the academics I’ve mentioned in this post are at Stanford and that they also have a straight up link for GIS and the humanities. Included is a neat little pdf that helps make the same kinds of claims I’m trying to make here.
• Mapping the Digital Humanities from HASTAC. This is a discussion that just began on mapping and the humanities. I don’t want to say too much about it.
• GIS for the Humanities from San Antonio College. I haven’t fully investigated this site.
• CrimeStat from the University of Michigan. Despite the name, CrimeStat can be used on any sort of point-based data (like events in a novel) to show deeper clustering and other relationships beyond what ArcGIS can do. It is free and Windows-only.

Tags: Deleuze and Guattari, digital humanities, Franco Moretti, geography, GIS, humanities, John Dos Passos, Stanford, tracing

(although, actually, all the talk about using a GIS is in the second part!)

I often feel like I’m a few drinks behind the rest of the crowd when it comes to drinking the digital humanities Kool-Aid. This is kind of a problem, because a chunk of what I’m trying to do with my dissertation is necessarily using software, hardware, and datasets to try and interpret some things about US novels from the 1930s. I should feel, then, right at home in digihum projects, but for some reason… it’s still not quite clicking. Much of what I see online strikes me as amateurish, tentative, or unsatisfying–which, to be fair, also was the general consensus around the chapter I presented last week at the American Cultures Workshop at the University of Chicago.

But my friend Manan, who works for Humanities Computing at the University, asked me to present something broader about some of the techniques I used to produce my paper. This was a great opportunity to explain in more detail about what I see as a potential source of trouble (strawman alert) in some “digital” approaches to the humanities, which is the reliance on “flat maps” to push along arguments. So here’s my presentation:

If you want to download just the PowerPoint (don’t judge!), I’ve got it up here: GIS for the Humanities.

In this first part of the post, I’ll tackle the first 14 slides of the presentation, which demonstrate what flat maps look like, how some people are using flat maps in the humanities, and ways that one can do the same. I’m not categorically against this sort of work, I feel I have to repeat constantly. I just don’t think it’s as groundbreaking as it seems (like when the Chronicle writes about it).

Anyway, here is the sort of “annotated version” of the first part of the presentation. All links open in new windows.

Space is terribly important in researching the Humanities, though it has often taken a backseat to history. Foucault was asked about this by geographer editors of Hérodote, and his responses (translated in 1980 into English and available in Power/Knowledge) slowly force him into acknowledging this oversight (though Foucault was always somewhat spatial). Jameson, on the other hand, claims that space has become newly important as a result of postmodernism. Soja, then, takes these two areas as jumping off grounds for his own positing of a postmodern geography.

If space is important then, how do we, as researchers, interact with it?

One avenue is Neogeography, which is the sort of user-contributed, web-based, amateur generation of cartographic information. This includes things like Flickr maps, personal Google Maps, and even technology that relies on geographical information without generating maps, like Photosynth. Google has managed to corner the market on this sort of technology, by both opening up the Google Maps API (GPS-enabled pigeons help monitor pollution) and by creating Google Earth, which has launched neogeography into the stratosphere.

Google Earth has been already used to help situate literary works on the site GoogleLitTrips. Aimed at the kiddie market, the site distributes .kmz files that have geocoded locations from works of literature. But the maps depend on Google Earth’s often sloppy layout. Though one can jump from point to point, creating a “trip,” it’s not too terribly dynamic. A similar entry in this sort of thing is Gutenkarte, which was developed by, among other people, Schuyler Erle. Gutenkarte, however, is not much different from the literary atlases that J. G. Bartholomew compiled at the start of the 20th century–especially since it only maps works in the Public Domain! Eventually, the site promises, there will be more interactivity, but for now, it’s more an exercise in showing how powerful the MetaCarta GeoParser is.

A few steps farther down the development chain is the Map of Early Modern London, a  project undertaken up in Canada. Based on a 16th century map of London, it is an interactive tour de force of information about various locations in London, and the site “aims to recreate some of what [Editor Janelle] Jenstad calls ‘the imaginative landscape of the place,’ its ‘cultural geography.’” The unspecificity of this kind of language irritates me, since it does not seem to have any analytic force. Jenstad writes on the map’s site that she uses the map to show “the geographical relationship between the city and Renaissance theatres, to map out the routes of processions and pageants” and the like. That’s fine, but what, precisely, makes a “geographical relationship”? Is Jenstad using the human eye to detect these relationships? (famously unreliable!)

These sorts of projects have merit, of course. They’re providing an index, a point of reference. They’re telling you what you already know, except spatially. Or they’re telling you something you didn’t know, in more detail. This means they also provide context (both within the text and against the material world). They also–and here’s where something like “imaginative landscape” comes in–allow a sort of empathetic / sentimental entryway into a certain space of alterity that’s certainly useful for readers.

But in their attachment toward presenting a narrative spatially–flattening a narrative–they are not providing any real analysis or doing much different than what Bartholomew did besides adding interactivity. They are to Bartholomew as Encarta is to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I adore maps in the beginnings of novels, for example, but they mostly serve no other purpose than to either get me excited about what will happen or help me keep various narrative balls in the air. They never tell me something new about the text itself. That may not be their point, but it also means that they aren’t useful as, say, a dissertation project. Nor do they demonstrate, in my opinion, quite enough dynamism to force the spatial turn away from having just history as the engine of analysis.

That’s what I mean when I call this sort of mapping “flat.” I don’t know where I got the term from. Likely suspects are Deleuze and Guattari, in which case “flat maps” are like their concepts of a “tracing,” but I may have gotten it from Moretti. They reproduce, they don’t provide new entryways. Yet often, that seems to be enough as far as people are concerned. The rhetorical flourish of a pretty map (one that I’ve made use of before) wows the audience, even if there’s no real there there.

If that’s ok, though, and one wants to make a flat map, I suggested using OpenStreetMaps instead of Google Maps. I also encouraged people to use the David Rumsey Collection’s downloadable kmz to help situate spatial data among historical maps.

In the second part of this post, I’ll talk more about what a GIS is, and how I see its use in doing actual research and analysis in the humanities, instead of just creating reproductions.

Tags: Deleuze and Guattari, digital humanities, Edward Soja, Franco Moretti, geography, GIS, humanities, Michel Foucault, modernism, postmodernism, tracing

It’s been forever since I’ve contributed to the Humanities Dissertation Project, I fear. I have something big in the background that I’m preparing toward it, but I thought I’d take advantage of my recent presentation of part of a chapter for the American Cultures workshop to include some handy (Xe)LaTeX tips I picked up.

The biggest irritation I had with the memoir class was that, for some reason, it was doublespacing my footnotes when I used the \DoubleSpacing command. I figured out how to stop that: I erased the line for \VerbatimFootnotes. I’m not sure why I enabled that command in the first place, but I certainly don’t need it for now. I also took advantage of the titlepage examples in memoir to spiff up my title a bit. I thought it was too big and started too far down the page.

I used the \vskip command to make a whitespace break in between thoughts. You call this command by typing something like this:

\vskip 20pt

It took me forever to get it to work, since I kept putting the measurement in either braces or brackets.

Furthermore, I made a few macros to speed up typing. For example,

\newcommand{\usa}{\textit{U.S.A.}}

made it so that I could just type \usa\ when referring to the trilogy by Dos Passos.

Further, I wanted a set of figures arranged in a table, but treated as separate figures (and numbered as such). The memoir manual helped here, and I basically had a 3×4 matrix that looked, per row, like this:


\begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth}
\centering
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{\includegraphics{mac.png}}
\caption{Mac} \label{mac}
\end{minipage}
\hfill
\begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth}
\centering
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{\includegraphics{janey.png}}
\caption{Janey} \label{janey}
\end{minipage}
\hfill
\begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth}
\centering
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{\includegraphics{j-ward-moorehouse.png}}
\caption{J. W. Moorehouse} \label{moorehouse}
\end{minipage}
\newline


This was far easier than I expected it to be. The {!} means to auto-scale the graphic to fit the width while adjusting the vertical appropriately.

Finally, I had the yucky task of formatting part of The Big Money. It didn’t come out perfectly, as the \vinphantom is not working properly and the two instances of [{\ldots}] are misaligned, but here is the text I used:


\begin{quotation}\SingleSpacing
``Comrades, let's sing,'' Don's voice shouted. Mary forgot everything as her voice joined his voice, all their voices, the voices of the crowds being driven back across the bridge in singing:

\begin{center}{\itshape Arise ye prisoners of starvation {\ldots}}

\vskip 30pt

\Large {\itshape Newsreel LXVI}

\vskip 15pt

\normalsize HOLMES DENIES STAY

\vskip 10pt

{\itshape A better world's in birth}
\end{center}
Tiny Wasps Imported from Korea In Battle To Death With Asiatic Beetle
\vskip 10pt
{\flushleft [{\ldots}]}

\begin{center}
Washington Keeps Eye On Radicals

\vskip 10pt
{\itshape Arise rejected of the earth}
\vskip 10pt
\textsc{paris brussels moscow geneva add their voices}

\begin{verse}
\begin{center}
{\itshape It is the final conflict}\vinphantom{ his}\\
\vinphantom{It }{\itshape Let each stand in his place}
\end{center}
\end{verse}

Geologist Lost In Cave Six Days

\vskip 10pt

{\itshape The International Party}

\vskip 10pt

SACCO AND VANZETTI MUST DIE

\vskip 10pt

{\itshape Shall be the human race.}
\end{center}

{\flushleft [{\ldots}]}

\begin{center}
\Large {\itshape The Camera Eye (50)}
\end{center}
\OnehalfSpacing
\hspace{2 em}they\hspace{1 em}have\hspace{1 em}clubbed\hspace{1 em}us\hspace{1 em}off\hspace{1 em}the\hspace{1 em}streets\hspace{2 em}they\hspace{1 em}are\hspace{1 em}stronger\hspace{1 em}they are rich\hspace{1 em}they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper editors {\ldots} they hire the men with guns\hspace{2 em}the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons

all right you have won\hspace{1 em}you will kill the brave men our friends tonight

there is nothing left to do\hspace{1 em}we are beaten\hspace{1 em}we the beaten crowd together\cite[1155–1156]{usa}
\end{quotation}

You can see the results here. And a shortened version of the .tex file, which generates the pdf, is available here.

Tags: John Dos Passos, LaTeX, memo

I’m positive people are way smarter about this than I am, but I only alluded to what I see as three reasons for studying dying languages in my previous post on the documentary The Linguists. Our linguists in the movie, Anderson and Harrison, sketch out basically three reasons, and movie addresses the three reasons over the course of the narrative, spending most of its time on the second. But it’s the sudden/out of nowhere appearance of the third that kind of bothered me enough to write the post that I did.

Academic. It’s valuable to study dying languages simply because it’s valuable to learn about the kinds of different ways humans have collectively developed means of communication. This has all sorts of wide-reaching applications, from seeing on the one hand what language systems hold in common (to help pursue something echt human), or to see how wildly they differ in order to account for that. The academic case is a really easy one for me to accept, since I find any sort of academic inquiry inherently worthwhile, even while others jump on a bandwagon to disagree.

Moral/Ethical. This is the centerpiece of The Linguists, because they point out that people would love to keep speaking their “true” native tongues (they don’t say “true,” but I need to indicate that it’s a iffy term), but that external forces coerce them into speaking other languages. Peer pressure and mockery from the Russian majority kept the Chulym from speaking their language, for example, or the promise of economic advancement with English knowledge leads parents to let their children abandon their Sora aptitude in India. This situation is especially true in colonial circumstances, and it’s amazing to consider the languages US expansionist policies wiped out. I’m very sympathetic to this viewpoint, but can’t go all in, since it starts making assumptions about the original speakers. That is, documenting Chulym so that the Chulym youth can learn it because it’s their cultural patrimony that was taken away from them is a borderline problematic proposition because…

Essentialist/Sentimental. …it starts blurring the line between oppression and making essentialist claims. If I had to guess, I wouldn’t think Anderson and Harrison believe the strong version of this, and perhaps their views were emphasized in the editing room, since the movie is not narrated chronologically at all. However, we do know that one of the directors, Seth Kramer, was inspired in part by a heritage trip he took to Vilnius, where he could not read the Yiddish inscriptions that had been legible to his ancestors. And it’s fine to want to study Yiddish in order to understand the language your ancestors spoke, for whatever reason. But when Yiddish becomes a person’s “history,” it starts getting a bit messier. Obviously, it’s incomprehensible, because we all reach a point where the language of our ancestors is irretrievable, so to assume a sort of permanent foundation of an identity based on language (which, obviously, is anything but permanent) is sort of, well, nuts if you think it through.

I’ve already pounced on the folly of essentialist ideas of cultural identity (based on language and other things) over on Lithchat, so I won’t do it again. But I did want to clarify these points from the earlier post this week.

Tags: essentialism, identity, language, linguistics, moribund languages, oppression

Language Log has been getting me excited about the documentary The Linguists for quite some time now, but the DVD costs $300, and it didn’t seem to air on any local PBS stations. Luckily, the movie is finally available (for a short time) online at babelgum.com. I strongly encourage people to watch this movie, as it’s a lot of fun, even if there are a few issues I have with it.

The movie follows two linguists, UofC PhD Greg Anderson and K. David Harrison, as they travel to Siberia, Bolivia, and India to document fast fading languages (Ös / Chulym, Kallawaya, and Sora, respectively). It’s fun to see fieldwork done around the world like that, and the two researchers have a pile of enthusiasm for the project that comes through onscreen, pushing the narrative ahead.

Yet while I value the work done on recording fading languages, the movie drifts into a more sentimental / essentialist justification of language preservation, which is something I’m not quite as sure is as obviously good thing. On the one hand, Anderson and Harrison excellently set a political / moral case—a stronger one than the academic case, which I (already) totally buy—for why the languages should be preserved: Chulym and Sora have been suppressed by the majority cultures, often affixing a sense of shame to the village language. “People are choosing to abandon their native language,” Harrison complains (rightly, probably), “because they perceive that they’ll have more economic advantages.” This is an old story, of course—and one that fuels, for example, Lithuanian nationalism—but still a valuable one. (Kallawaya, on the other hand, is a secret language with limited transmission because of intellectual property built into knowledge of the language!)

On the other hand, the problem emerges when we go from this justification for language preservation to a sense that is more sentimental, mystical, and tied to an idea of a cultural heritage or history that precedes the individual.

In Siberia, the linguists have their 50 year old prize subject Chulym speaker tell a story to a classroom full of people of all ages. Harrison next tells the crowd, in Russian, that they have all just heard a story “на чулымском языке.” The local children—the very children who did not inherit the language for whatever reason—are encouraged to illustrate the story for a small book. At this point, the movie is moving more from linguistics to the production of cultural artifacts/literature, so I’m academically qualified to whine a bit further…

“A true community project,” Anderson calls this picture book, the first book ever published in the Chulym language. Anderson then explains what a thrill it is “watching people reconnect in essence with their history,” and Harrison adds, “their past.” But what history? What past? It’s interesting that the movie winds down on these notes—the linguists stomp through a graveyard looking for “Chulym surnames,” as intertitles tell us that four of the Chulym speakers interviewed for the movie (and for research) have died in the intervening period, ramping up the emotional investment and sense of urgency. Finally, the movie closes with the 50 year old Chulym speaker, explaining, in Chulym, that he always loved the language, and that his mother explained to him that the Russians should be allowed to speak Russian, and the Chulym, Chulym.

It’s a touching moment, but Harrison’s presentation to the children illustrators, in which we hear him say “на чулымском языке,” reminds us of the first section filmed in Siberia, where the linguists interview a nearly deaf woman in her 90s. Harrison asks her to say something “на чулымском,” and then it’s a girl, perhaps the woman’s great granddaughter, who shouts to her, “скажи что-нибудь на чулымском языке! На чулымском языке скажи!” Sure, she’s shouting since the subject to be interviewed is nearly deaf, but it’s an interesting twist—the girl certainly does not seem to be particularly historically tied to the language the old woman is getting ready to speak, and she seems almost annoyed by the imposition these Americans are making. Furthermore, in fact, we don’t even get to hear the old woman speak Chulym—the film immediately moves to uncover the revelation that the linguists’ driver is a fluent speaker of Chulym.

What I mean to address here is that the sense of “reconnection to [one's] history”—whatever that means—is a weird way to close an (ostensibly) scientific movie. The children, allegedly returning to their Chulym roots are doing so by illustrating (extra linguistic cultural production) a story told to them (I imagine) via translation into Russian. Considering that it’s very likely that Chulym language suppression is precisely part of the history of the Chulym people and their cultural identity, I find it contradictory to include this scene (complete with echoes of the earlier scene) as some kind of argument for a deep essential Chulym identity that’s crackable only via the Chulym language. What’s the point of this weird essentialist position, other than the aim of bringing out the worst armchair Sapir/Whorfians in all of us?

Anyway, if this is too subtle a point, I’ll leave this as a starting point for a completely different argument: in one section of the movie, Harrison (I think), says something along the lines of:

I don’t see how you can justify devoting your research career to the syntax of French (a language with millions of speakers), when the skills that you possess could help document a language that is going to go extinct within your lifetime.

Discuss.

Tags: chulym, essentialism, heritage, history, language, Language Log, linguistics, moribund languages, nationalism, oppression, russian, University of Chicago

In preparation of presenting a paper on dos Passos (that is part of the second chapter of my dissertation), I decided to buckle down and try to develop a sort of large grasp on the three novels that make up the USA trilogy, The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money. Part of that grasp is developing a sense of the four different modes of writing that dos Passos employs. There are straightforward narratives (with chapters named after the main characters); “Newsreel” sections which stitch together popular songs, headlines, and news stories; “The Camera Eye” sections, which are apparently autobiographical and largely beyond description at this point; and, finally, mini-biographies of actual Americans, headed with a nickname mostly, and often written in a more opaque and actively textual style than the regular narratives, without being as blurry and disorienting as the other two sections.

Since the biographies are spread out over the 1200 pages of the trilogy, it’s tough to try and gauge a sense of what they demonstrate when considered as a whole. So here I’m producing a list of them, in order of their appearance in the novels. One will note that the large portion of persons were dead before dos Passos wrote about them, but not all of them. But the question to the reader of this post, then, is this: does this list of Americans stand in for a history of the USA from 1900–1930, which is one of the possible goals of the trilogy? What do you think? More importantly, who is missing?

• The 42nd Parallel (1930)
  
  • “Lover of Mankind,” Eugene Debs (1855–1926), wobbly, socialist and politician
  • “The Plant Wizard,” Luther Burbank (1849–1926), botanist and horticulturalist
  • “Big Bill,” Bill Haywood (1869–1928), wobbly and socialist
  • “The Boy Orator of the Platte,” William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), politician
  • “Emperor of the Caribbean,” Minor C. Keith (1848–1929), businessman and colonialist
  • “Prince of Peace,” Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), industrialist and philanthropist
  • “The Electrical Wizard,” Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931), genius and businessman
  • “Proteus,” Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1965–1923), mathematician and engineer
  • “Fighting Bob,” Robert M. La Follette, Sr. (1855–1925), politician
• 1919 (1932)
  • “Playboy,” Jack Reed (1887–1920), journalist and communist
  • “Randolph Bourne,” Randolph Bourne (1886–1918), writer and philosopher
  • “The Happy Warrior,” Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), jack of manly trades
  • “A Hoosier Quixote,” Paxton Hibben (1881–1928), historian and soviet chronicler
  • “Meester Veelson,” Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), politician and academic
  • “The House of Morgan,” J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), devil
  • “Joe Hill,” Joe Hill (1879?–1915), songwriter and wobbly
  • “Paul Bunyan,” Wesley Everest (1890–1919), wobbly
  • “The Body of an American”
• The Big Money (1936)
  • “The American Plan,” F. W. Taylor (1856–1915), management consultant
  • “Tin Lizzie,” Henry Ford (1863–1947), industrialist and efficiency expert
  • “The Bitter Drink,” Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), sociologist and economist
  • “Art and Isadora,” Isadora Duncan (1877–1927), dancer and communist
  • “Adagio Dancer,” Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926), actor and sex symbol
  • “The Campers at Kitty Hawk,” The Wright Brothers (Orville: 1871–1948; Wilbur: 1867–1912), inventors
  • “Architect,” Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), architect
  • “Poor Little Rich Boy,” William Randolph Hearst (1869–1951), publisher
  • “Power Superpower,” Samuel Insull (1859–1938), investor
  • “Vag”

The last two biographies of the last two novels, “The Body of an American” and “Vag” don’t describe any single person. In fact, they’re notable in how they try to create an assemblage of a person from various singularities. I would not even lump them with the biographies, except that, in the table of contents, they are presented in the same type style as the biographies (each mode has its own heading style).

Tags: america, biography, history, John Dos Passos