I compared reviews of Dries Van Noten runway shows from 2000-2014 using the stylecom_reviews dataset from the Harvard dataverse. (In 2000, Style.com was founded by Condé Nast and launched as the online supplement for their print publications Vogue and W and hosted original content.) I limited the documents in the corpus to Belgian brand Dries Van Noten with the hopes of seeing how the collections, and critics’ impressions of them, changed over time. Since the founder and brand’s namesake, Dries Van Noten, remains the only Designer/Chief Creative Officer in the label’s history, the interwoven brand and designer ethos allows one to consider this more of a single body of work, a continuous expression through fashion design, than a corpus composed of reviews of multiple brands or multiple designers.

Before diving into the experience, I want to expand on the nature of the documents in the corpus, and what a distant reading of them may reveal. Given that these are reviews of collections, it’s important to clarify the role of criticism in fashion. In May 2023, Robin Givhan, Senior Critic-at-Large for the Washington Post and Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, said to Interview Magazine, “The role of the critic, whether it’s a critic who’s writing about fashion or visual arts or music, is the same. It’s to try and help the reader forge connections, to look at things in a different way. It’s to help them to navigate a fire hose of information and ideas, to provide a framework for thinking about the subject matter.” Let’s consider the reviews as the critics’ efforts to contextualize the collection and show experience for the reader, and not a direct expression from the designer.

I saved each review as a text file and uploaded them all to Voyant. What follows attempts to describe Dries Van Noten’s design leanings through criticism at a high level while also capturing how his expression morphs over time.

Most Frequent Words:

The first few most frequent words may not be a surprise, as one might expect reviews to reference the brand and designer names, a collection, and show by nature of the subject. It could be interesting to take up a comparative analysis between designers to see if critics refer to designers or brands as frequently, and how they do so, as that may indicate the perceived strength of a designer’s identity in their work.

A sense of clothing and design elements emerge, as well. Distant readers may understand Van Noten as a designer who embraces a number of visual styles (e.g., prints, gold, white, color, black) and techniques (e.g., embroidered) across a variety of garments (e.g. jackets, pants, coats, skirt/skirts, dresses) with common design or styling elements (e.g., long, high, shapes).

Distinctive Words:

While the most frequent words in the corpus propose a general design identity, the distinctive words reveal unique design choices, inspirations, and impressions across individual collections and shows.

Contexts:

“Like” is among the most frequent words in the corpus, and I wanted to understand if it was used in any comparisons or just to list examples. Taking a closer reading of the text reveals a number of compelling comparisons that contextualize design and show elements to the reader.

Simile:

• the front of the body like a religious garment (Fall 2002)
• had a well-loved feel, like a beautiful gold couture piece (Fall 2003)
• characters on this runway looked like refugees from the Mitteleuropean 1940s (Fall 2005)
• particularly stunning were the prints, which looked like old tapestries (Spring 2005)
• It’s that kind of research and informed reflection that makes a Dries show like a visit to a glamorous library (Spring 2012)
• [To compare the marriage of luxurious, soft, beautiful fabrics with hardy, rough, structured ones in the collection.] It was just like the royal family (French, Russian, pick another) disguising themselves as peasants in a futile attempt to escape the revolution (Spring 2014)
• Daiane Conterato’s resolute little face looking like she was ready to flamenco (Spring 2014)

The exercise offered an interesting interrogation of the visual, tactile, and audible experience of seeing clothing and attending a fashion show given that I didn’t look at images from the shows, and readers may have only be presented a handful when these reviews were first published. I thought about A Massively Addressable Object by Michael Witmore in this week’s readings where he asserts that “a text is a text because it is massively addressable at different levels of scale.” For this analysis, there is validity in comparing this corpus with another designer’s as a single word (e.g., gold, prints, shapes, embroidered, organza, mousseline) can convey great detail about the subject.

Works Cited

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style.com

Interview Magazine, 12 May 2023, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/fashion/robin-givhan-on-the-state-of-fashion-criticism-in-2023. Accessed 22 Oct. 2023.

I decided to do a text analysis for a company stock research report that was published by a work colleague. What I hope to accomplish is to see whether someone looking at the Voyant maps below, can guess the author’s gender, from the themes, and use of language in the report. Also, I thought it would be interesting to see if the Voyant maps would be enough for a reader to determine the name and ticker of the stock in question, relying solely on the data presented. Furthermore, without knowing the industry (sector), or the stock ticker, with this data, could one be able to determine the analyst’s recommendation (Buy, Hold or Sell). I tried to select a stock that isn’t widely traded such as AAPL or META.

After Glancing over the words and seeing “resorts”, “gaming”, “casino”, and the abbreviation “lv”, I would imagine that a non-financial reader would decipher that the document in question is gambling related.

For someone with a financial background, common debt related acronyms, namely, “ebitda“, short for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization and “ebitdar“, short for EBITDA + restructuring or rent costs, would also lead one to know that the stock was Casino related. With regards to a rating, the words “growth” and “revenue” are rather large in comparison to other words, and as such, I’d think that the reader could guess that the analyst has a favorable view on the stock. A few other words that are sizable, would probably not trigger clues for someone not familiar with this company’s name or the stock symbol, but the clues such as “locals”, “rock”, & “red” would be enough for one to take an educated guess, in my view. Two other words of note are “population” and “land” – Vegas has been growing for the last decade…

The frequency of some words used, would also help one guess the stock in question.

Here the word “durango ” stands out, which isn’t a great clue given the city is in Colorado, and we’ve already determined that the company in question is in Las Vegas. If one does a Google search for “Durango Las Vegas” however, one can get even closer to guessing the stock in question.

During this exercise in “distant reading,” and after reading Distant Reading after Moretti and Gender and Cultural Analytics: Finding or Making Stereotypes?, I tried to see if the gender of the author could be established from the vocabulary, which I would imagine is difficult when reviewing technical or analytical work. In scrutinizing all the words, I did come across the word “gun” and wondered if it was used to make a great effort to win or obtain something – a term that I’ve infrequently used by some male friends, but that I haven’t recalled hearing from female friends or family.

This caused me to wonder about the context in which it was used, but that didn’t prove anything as noted below, but this did lead me to wonder whether there are ways to be mindful of how “a conclusion about ‘male’ and ‘female’ modes of thinking and writing as if the M/F terms were simple pointers to an unproblematic reality” (Gender and Cultural Analytics: Finding or Making Stereotypes?). This isn’t as much of a concern or problem in finance, where being a good stock picker has nothing to do with gender, in my view.

Can you guess the stock?

I thought it’d be interesting to drop several texts by the same author into Voyant to see if I could learn anything about how that author uses language across their oeuvre. For my sample, I used a few of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels — specifically, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, and The Idiot — because I’m somewhat familiar with them and because each text was available via Project Gutenberg. I copy/pasted the plain-text files (excluding the introductory and concluding text added by Project Gutenberg) into the same Voyant window.

The results loaded, and most seemed pretty meaningless. The most common words were, unsurprisingly, “the,” “and,” “to,” “of,” and “I”. I had to dig deeper to start finding some bread crumbs of potential insight. After scrolling through the list of most common terms for a little while, I started to see more substantial terms: “prince,” “old,” “cried,” “heart,” and so on. These all felt very Dostoevskyian. 

I explored a handful of these. “Old,” for instance, is used over 1,000 times across this corpus. From the “contexts” window, I noticed “old” was used in a variety of ways — ”three-year-old,” “old-fashioned,” “an old friend,” and so on. 

Voyant pointed me to a passage — where Alexei (Alyosha) Karamazov visits his father — that is densely populated with the word “old”: 

“Though there was a dining‐room in the house, the table was laid as usual in the drawing‐room, which was the largest room, and furnished with old‐fashioned ostentation. The furniture was white and very old, upholstered in old, red, silky material. In the spaces between the windows there were mirrors in elaborate white and gilt frames, of old‐fashioned carving. On the walls, covered with white paper, which was torn in many places, there hung two large portraits—one of some prince who had been governor of the district thirty years before, and the other of some bishop, also long since dead.”

Here, “old” is repeated so often it practically becomes a parody. But by paying attention to “old,” I also started to see other terms in the passage that strengthen its effect — e.g., “thirty years before” and “long since dead” — which add to the portrait of the father’s home (and the father himself) as stuffy and antiquated. 

Reading this passage, I also became interested in the term “ostentation.” It only appears 3 times in the corpus, all in The Brothers Karamazov. The second and third instances appear close to each other — in the sermons of Father Zosima, who criticizes how people “live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation” and then again for their “gluttony, fornication, ostentation, boasting and envious rivalry of one with the other.” These instances more directly link ostentation with immorality and sin. Now, revisiting the earlier passage, we can see traces of this kind of judgment in the description of Fyodor Pavlovich’s (the father’s) house.

Investigating both of these words (“old” and “ostentation”) drew me into the texts in ways I didn’t expect. Voyant allowed me to shuttle between distant and close perspectives as I engaged with the corpus, seeing linkages between words that appeared many pages or even books apart. 

It also expanded how I thought about Dostoevsky’s writing, helping me see beyond my existing assumptions and notions. To this end, I think one of the key benefits of text mining tools like Voyant is its ability to lead us down paths of inquiry that we might not have considered otherwise. 

In this sense, it reminds me of Richard Jean So and Edwin Roland’s article “Race and Distant Reading.” When So and Roland examine where their model fails to accurately classify an author’s race, they use James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (classified by the model as being written by a white author) as a case study. Among their findings, they realize the word “appalled,” used just once in the novel, has an “outsized influence” on the language model — and this isn’t random. Despite its scarcity, the word “appalled” serves a unique function in Baldwin’s novel, which they would never have noticed if it weren’t for the model (So and Roland 71).

Works cited

So, Richard Jean and Edwin Roland. 2020. “Race and Distant Reading.” PMLA 135.1: 59–73.

   According to Arendt, the establishment of Plato’s Academy outside of the polis after the trial and death of Socrates indicates the actual break between philosophy and politics (thought/action & theory/practice). This break has been lying within the tradition of Western thought; thus, she argues that classical political philosophy, from Plato to Marx, had become anti-political. In short, they had neglected the concept of action.

When speaking of action, Arendt emphasizes that they always involve men, not a man. This indicates that action is only possible in concert with others and is relevant to the human condition of plurality. She underlines that “Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world…this plurality is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life.” (Arendt, 1998) For Arendt, the dichotomy between thought(philosophy) and action(politics) means the shrinkage of the public sphere and the loss of civic virtue. Then, can the open-access movement in today’s academia bridge between thought and action? What is the role of academic communities?  

Knowledge commons, such as information, scientific discoveries, and creative works, has a unique feature distinguished from traditional commons. It is relatively non-subtractive and non-rivalrous; this means that one’s use of knowledge commons does not reduce others’ opportunities for the commons. Therefore, it does not belong to the logic of scarcity, i.e., the myth of the tragedy of the commons. In other words, knowledge can and should be for everyone.

With the access revolution enabled by technological advances, Suber argues that we should make barrier-free access by removing two main barriers to the public: a price tag and copyright. This is also possible thanks to the distinctive legacy within scholarly societies:

The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (Suber, 2012)

  It is at the heart of our values. We do not create knowledge in order to hoard it, but instead, every day, in the classroom, in the lecture hall, and in our writing, we embrace an ethic that I’ve come to think of as “giving it away.” (…) not as a means of self-expression but rather as an act of generosity that enables the addict to transcend the limitations of the self. “Giving it away” is thus a profoundly ethical mode of engaging with others in a community based around a common need. (Fitzpatrick, 2019)

We still have a long way to go regarding knowledge commons and the openness of scholarly societies. For example, sharing knowledge between communities, participants, and institutions should not discourage individuals’ creativity and productivity. Also, the open-access project should not just depend on individuals’ benevolence – an act of generosity & “giving it away.” Despite all the complex problems unsolved, the attempt and rediscovery of intellectual commitment in the public sphere through an open-access platform is a promising step.

For Socrates, the role of a philosopher is not to rule the city but to be its gadfly, encouraging people to give their opinions and share them with others because he knows the importance of persuasion through open dialogue, and he willingly became a gadfly in a polis. In this sense, the open-access platform is not merely a new technical term but must be an intellectual obligation for the public good.

In response to the Open Access (OA) as Solving Problems chapter in Peter Subers book, it is interesting to note that although Ivy League libraries may not support current models for publishing scholarly information (including OA), they nonetheless continue to perpetuate them and lack creative ideas to improve them. Here’s something interesting that one of my professor’s (Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Scholarly Communication) raised with regards to going beyond Open Access with Public Access. The statement from the IvyPlus libraries can be found here. Prof. Cirasella states that the IvyPlus response is a reaction to a federal memo about increasing public access to federally funded research. But she is critical of the fact that that there’s no plan in the memo for how public access will be achieved.

In The Questions of Minimal Computing, Roopika Rissam and Alex Gli define Minimal Computing, a task they admit is likely idealistic and difficult, as “a mode of thinking in Digital Humanities praxis that resists the idea that innovation is defined by newness, scale, or scope.”

Throughout much of the piece, Rissam and Gil present minimal computing to be a stance taken as the result of resource scarcity. Their approach to make choices on what’s most important given what resources are available aims to develop a DH that is widely accessible and more equitable to people who have been excluded from, or had no control over, the production of their communities own knowledge in other projects. As discussed in previous readings and classes, certain elements of DH projects, from collecting and constructing archives, to the choice in scientific graphics or computational methods may reinforce colonialist and unethical biases. One great result of this conversation around minimal computing is that it forces us to consider the systems in which projects are developed and executed when encountering them and evaluating the final projects.

There are potential downsides to always eschewing technically advanced projects or solutions. One I can think of is the loss of nuance when using simpler graphics or static websites that may produce a more abstracted final project than a map that can zoom or visual representations of intersectionality. Much of DH work is about slowing down and making a mess of a subject to represents a its complexities. While simpler solutions may inspire researchers to find creative solutions, how to balance detail and abstraction must be considered when planning a project. While trying to balance resources and their visions, DH practitioners shouldn’t hesitate to learn and use more technically innovative or advanced methodologies, especially given the value that humanists can bring to conversations around fast-developing technologies like Machine Learning and AI.

I attended GCDI’s Confessions or a Digital Hoarder workshop on October 12th. I was interested to hear from an academic side what challenges can arise when trying to maintain digital content.

The workshop was run by Digital Fellow Leanne Fan and started off covering the services that GCDI offers and how to go about accessing them.

Leanne started us off with some vocabulary, which I thought was helpful for determining where you may stand in the matrix of digital hoarding. Before this workshop, I had not considered a nuanced breakdown of digital hoarding, but leading with introductory language for defining the different ways we hoard digital content was a great starting point. My current struggles present with constant acquisition (“Constant gathering of digital content, without much consideration of its value, purpose or utility.”). I’d like to believe I exercise a certain level of discernment when screen-grabbing or bookmarking certain content, but I can recount many occasions where I couldn’t fathom why I’d saved a piece of content. There are also different digital hoarding types, I identify with anxiety driven. My present self strongly believes that “yes, I could totally use this information in the future”. My future self… doesn’t always agree, but in some ways, I can’t shake that it’s better to save whatever the content is just in case.

One of the more interesting perspectives that surfaced during the workshop was the various ways digital hoarding costs us. Leanne gave some concrete costs, like environmental. Particularly salient was the attention to the mental cost. Another Digital Fellow, Silvia, shared a link that discusses the mental health cost of digital hoarding. She emphasized that our digital acquisition could have a strong influence on our mental health, even though it is technically virtual. And I felt that deeply, as I have lost numerous hours searching multiple browser history or download logs seeking what I’ve lost. I feel anxious about losing important things and frustrated with myself for not managing my data better.

The workshop shared some tips or tools (and attendees shared what they do or use anecdotally). This file naming and organizing structure was mentioned and seems like it could be useful for keeping track of content. I was particularly interested in this link for comparing notating apps. I am currently using Notion, txt files, and paper journals, but it’s been hard to find a good note-taking rhythm now that my course readings are primarily digital.

It would be great to see a future version of this workshop with more focus on challenges more specific to digital hoarding in the academic space. More demonstration on how to mitigate the hinderances it might pose to getting papers and projects done would also be great to see.

Reading “Hybrid Scholarly Publishing Models in a Digital Age” — published by Professors Michael and Karlin, alongside Matthew K. Gold — gave me a newfound appreciation for the ways the Manifold platform has facilitated a more collaborative and student-led style of learning within the classroom this semester.

Coincidentally, this past week, I bought my first-ever e-book — an experience that drew me into a beguiling labyrinth of market forces and motivations. I’ll describe these below, as a way of unpacking some of “the ecological, economic, and logistical traces that books leave as they move through the processes of creation, production, and distribution” (Michael et al. 280). It’s important to note, however, that this e-book was for sale, and that its sales likely pay out in the form of royalties to the author, as opposed to an open access model like much of what appears on Manifold.

A co-worker recently recommended R. F. Kuang’s Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, a work of semi-historical fantasy fiction. I hadn’t yet taken any steps to get my hands on it — I wasn’t sure I wanted to buy it, and I figured there’d be a long line of holds in the public library system — when this co-worker told me about an Amazon Prime Day sale. The book was being sold in e-book form for just $2.99.* Who doesn’t love a good deal? 

I didn’t have a Kindle reader, but I learned there’s a Kindle app for Apple devices, so I downloaded it. I looked up the book, but the app told me the book wasn’t available on my device — even though Amazon’s website said I could use the Kindle app to read it. It was then that another co-worker let me in on a secret: If you buy the e-book on your desktop, it’ll automatically appear on the mobile app. As it turns out, the confusing app experience was intentional: this way, Amazon is able to avoid having to pay app store owners like Apple and Google a cut for e-book purchases, since the transactions are taking place outside the app.

Anyways, I finally had my book. Amazon wasted no time in trying to upsell me: If I paid another $12, I could get the audiobook version, so that I could seamlessly switch between formats without losing my place. This was a strong selling point and speaks to how book publishers and 3rd-party platforms like Amazon can potentially gain from a hybrid / multimodal publishing model by creating sequences of purchases tied to increasing levels of textual value.

As the authors of the “Hybrid Publishing” article describe, “The relative value a text or digital file holds is bound in cultural, legal, and moral contexts” (Michael et al. 288). In this case, Amazon is able to use not just print and digital mediums, but also audio, as individual levers to fuel sales. The price differentials between mediums imply a hierarchy of values: in this case, the e-book is positioned as an entry point, but a diminished one. For the fuller experience, you should really buy the audiobook.

I found this morass of market dynamics fascinating for the ways they simultaneously facilitated and obstructed my journey into the text. Ultimately, I ended up reading (and enjoying) a book I might not have read otherwise, though not without some struggle along the way.

*The book is ~560 pages long, which, at the price of $2.99, equates to just half a cent per page.

Works cited

Michael, Krystyna, Jojo Karlin, and Matthew K. Gold, 2022. “Hybrid Scholarly Publishing Models in a Digital Age.” New Directions in Print Cultures Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture. Bloomsbury Press.

For the text-analysis praxis assignment, I used both Voyant and Google N-Gram.

The motivation behind my choice to do the text-mining praxis is the doubt about its usefulness and applicability to a humanistic inquiry, especially in philosophy. In my opinion, the strength of humanistic inquiry lies in the continuous interplay between the understanding and misunderstanding of theories and perspectives, namely doxa, not a single absolute truth, even though this process needs lots of time. In “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities,” the authors argued about the digital tool’s utility.

Further, digital instruments work a lot faster. Reading Foucault and applying his theoretical framework can take months or years of application. A web-based text analysis tool could apply its theoretical position in seconds. (Stephen Ramsay/ Geoffrey Rockwell)

First, I wanted to see if the text-mining tool could grasp a particular philosopher’s theoretical concepts and connections among those concepts. I wondered if the tools could provide meaningful results and various insights to those without prior knowledge about a specific philosophical position. Second, using Google N-Gram, I tried to compare the trends in philosophical works and concepts as time passed.

I used one of my favorite philosophy works, the late Wittgenstein’s “The Philosophical Investigations,” for the text analysis.

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(1^st Analysis)

(1^st Analysis)

The outcomes were interesting and confusing. I needed a guide of Voyant terms, such as links, cirrus, vocabulary density, and readability index. Although I can see the frequency of words in the first analysis, it had to be trimmed to see the central philosophical concepts. The text I used for the praxis is an English-German version; thus, I got rid of many pointless words with Nicole’s advice and help. (Thank you. Nicole!)

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(2^nd Analysis)

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(3^rd Analysis)

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(4^th Analysis)

Finally, I could see those meaningful concepts in the late Wittgenstein’s works, such as language, game, investigations, use, form, and pain.

By using the Links tool, I got an enjoyable result. It offered a clear distinction between two groups of concepts. However, the tool still has shortcomings in terms of understanding and insight. It could be helpful to those with background knowledge. Still, it seems almost impossible to comprehend the text’s philosophical perspective for those who don’t have a prior understanding of the text.

Next, I tried applying another text analysis tool, Google N-Gram, to both early and late Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

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(Ranks between philosophers: Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger)

(Wittgenstein’s two main opposing concepts in his early and late works. / His significant contributions to Western philosophy, the linguistic turn.)

In today’s philosophy, many epistemologists agree on the methodology that treats knowledge as a form of proposition (“S knows that P.”). As seen in the graph, Wittgenstein’s two concepts, language game and linguistic turn, reflect this trend of today’s philosophy. Together, as expected, the chart shows that his late work and its central concept, the language game, are more applicable to various fields than his early philosophy, represented by the notion of the picture theory of language. (This might indicate that Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is too esoteric to understand.) 

In a way, text analysis tools help view a broad picture of the field; however, I still doubt they could suggest a deep understanding of philosophical reasoning and logical argument.

When I was doing the modules to get started with Wikepedia editing I had noticed the presence of what Kwok (2020) refers to as the “neutrality problem”. I immediately thought to myself that one of the Five Pillars of Wikepedia isn’t really possible since all writing is shaped by political context, something that a lot of different education spaces still need to work on understanding. I’m glad that there’s a growing number of scholars in different fields who are willing to take on this epistemological interrogation of how much of Western academic principles are designed to center some ways of thinking over others, often making objectivity and impartiality more of a myth than a practice. This was my first time creating a Wikepedia account and making an edit to a page. I felt similar emotions to those described by Mari (2020) in the “When Wikepedia Fought Back” article in that I was also surprised to see just how “alive” Wikipedia is. This assignment and the readings helped me learn a lot about the social and political dynamics of how Wikipedia pages operate. Though I’m disappointed (but not surprised) to see that Wikepedia still doesn’t consider “blog posts” and similar materials to be “verifiable” materials appropriate for using as citations/references since not everyone with important knowledge to share with the world can access academic publishing and sometimes social media is the best option for finding documentation of different things. 

For the assignment I ended up editing Wikipedia page of the late Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldua. She’s one of those scholars that despite having a lot of really great ideas and profound impact on her communities, also said some really problematic things in her papers along the way. I noticed that a lot of my gender/women’s studies professors often had no clue about some of the critiques that Anzaldua’s work has been receiving the last decade until I brought it up in class. I think it’s one of those things where people’s critiques were getting suppressed for a long time and now as more Black and Indigenous Latino scholars manage to successfully carve out space in Latino academic spaces designed to exclude us there’s finally more academic sources critiquing Anzaldua’s work that professors can assign in their courses if they want to continue teaching Anzaldua’s work. I added the highlighted sentence with a citation to the brief “Criticism” section on her Wikepedia page.