Tuesday, January 3rd, 2017
Defining Intellectual Encounters Further: A Case Study in Geo-Bibliographic Locating
Each year in her “Seminar in Modern Rhetoric (ENG 624),” Professor Patricia Sullivan engages her students in thought experiments, teaching them to look historiographically at which sources dominate histories of the field, sometimes engaging them in individual or collaborative source-mapping, and other times completing her own experiment before giving it to the students to analyze.
During Spring 2016, Sullivan and the members of ENG 624 examined the scope of John C. Brereton’s The Origins of Composition Studies in the American University, 1875-1925, which offers a meticulously drawn documentary history of composition goals, curricula, outcomes, and in some cases sample assignments or student work, gleaned from institutional repositories and college catalogues across the country. As she had done in semesters past, Sullivan invited the Seminar to interrogate the assumption that American rhetoric and writing programs had historically modeled themselves after Harvard’s composition program established late in the 1870s, and she had students make use of current bibliographic sources and open mapping tools.
During the semester, Sullivan undertook her own experiment, ultimately plotting a map with interacting data points aggregated from three different sources: (1) the titles of rhetoric and writing textbooks used at certain colleges between 1800 and 1900, as listed in their college catalogs, found in digitized form via Google Books; (2) the titles of rhetoric and writing textbooks used at additional colleges between 1800 and 1900, as listed in their college catalogs, found in the HathiTrust repository; and (3) the titles of rhetoric and writing textbooks used at certain colleges between 1882 and 1884, as named in the 1883 (5th) edition of the American College Dictionary, found online.
The resulting color-coded map offers simultaneous geographic and bibliographic locators so that its users can determine whose texts (e.g., Aristotle, George Campbell, Hugh Blair, Richard Whately, etc.) were present in what college curricula during different periods of the nineteenth century, ultimately pointing to courses that predate Harvard’s.
The bibliographic record tied to each locator offers links to digitized versions of the catalog where the information was found, curricular emphasis of the course, as well as level of course (e.g., freshman through senior). The map is still in progress, but its most current version offers historiographers concrete ways to reconsider the range and scope of Brereton’s sketch, by considering the types of courses offered (i.e., lecture versus practicum), the popularity of some authors and topics over others, and whether and how those courses of study varied by region or institution type. [For Sullivan’s complete methodology, including research questions and pattern observations, visit this link.]
While much of this involves Sullivan’s own invisible labor—not only the months she spent aggregating her data, but also the years she spent developing her multi-step methodology—I offer “ENG 624 Map” as an explicit example of what the LWP project creators understand to be a collaborative intellectual encounter. This kind of project reflects the spirit and methodology underlying how we are developing the platform. What makes this an “encounter” is not simply that a group of scholars accumulated data and offered a visual representation; rather, the nature of an encounter—whether or not it results in data visualization—is characterized by five tensions and dilemmas:
1. First and foremost, an intellectual encounter in LWP reflects the hybridized nature of our work, i.e., toggling between digital only and/or digitized catalogues and databanks – indeed, things that might only be conceived of as big or open data digital tools – with more specialized sets of information, encyclopedic or otherwise, that occur in physical form. This hybridization is not only about the materials we must use together; it is about our attitudes and approaches to them, i.e., we tend to use digital tools by semantic searching, but we cannot use physical tools in the same way. Thus, we learn both topical and semantic approaches, both logical and linguistic, and the innovations emerge when we apply those attitudes to both kinds of tools where possible.
2. Second, an encounter reflects the stacked, cumulative, incremental, and often collaborative nature of making data sets in LWP. Sometimes an encounter allows the LWP project team only to get as far as identifying that a data set exists or can be aggregated, thus we can mark its parameters, and set out to complete it in other ways, and we see this in Sullivan’s case. To wit, of the 350 schools listed in the ACD offering rhetoric and writing curriculum between 1882 and 1884, Sullivan knows only a portion of their catalogs have been digitally archived. It is thus up to her, to future ENG 624 seminars, to future collaborators, or to future researchers to help expand or extend that data set. Productive intellectual encounters will model the short- and long-term collaborations to which LWP aspires, by making researchers more visible to one another, by democratizing historical labor, and by opening up actual data resources and potential archival opportunities to one another, rather than closing them off.
3. Third, an encounter reflects the dilemmas we know we contend with on a regular basis when working between gestalts of geography, topography, chronology, and disciplinarity. Sullivan’s map makes a convenient locator, and a generative one, but the constraints of the map cause her to withhold certain data points, in the same way that LWP creators have to think distinctly about different functions of the knowledge base we are trying to build.
4. Fourth, an encounter reflects the real question of where we should go for data that can be easily accessed or scraped. Once we have done so, how do we ensure that our work does not preclude the need for other historians’ interpretations, i.e., that we do not erase opportunities or eliminate the imperative for historians to make their own conclusions? In Sullivan’s ENG 624 project, the spreadsheet informing curricular activity in specific decades remains a richer source of data, as does her full data file scraped from the ACD, yet the utility of her maps is in how they encourage students to practice interpretation. Thus, Sullivan did not simply find one extant data set ready to scrape; she constructed it through Google Books in order to know how best to expand her second set in HathiTrust.
5. Finally, an encounter reflects the various tensions between modern and potentially postmodern approaches to data work. While Sullivan does not explicitly argue this point in her assignment notes, the nature of how she lays out the activity reflects an always-already deconstructionist approach to data observation. For the LWP project team, this tension has been a driving force for most of our conversations, and will be explored in further posts.
-T. Graban
