Floating Ngrams and a (re)Decentering of Language

I found the task of working with the concordances in association with the texts this week fascinating and challenging. The collaboration and tools offered a different view of our texts and authors, and it was an illuminating to add a different perspective. To borrow from Kirsch and Royster’s, these tasks forced a “tacking in and out, through the use of critical imagination as a dialectical and dialogical analytical tool,” (655) to put texts into conversation with one another and broader contexts. The tools were a places to play as we “learn[ed] to look more systematically beyond our own contemporary values and assumptions” (Kirsch and Royster 652). The use of the tools had us examining the situated knowledge of the texts through a feminist objectivity (Haraway 188). This alternative close and long view, combined with the reading, illuminated a different reading of the texts and their situatedness, especially when thinking about inclusions and exclusions. Using these machine readings helped to illustrate the “politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims” (Haraway 195). The tools offered a positioning and context that broadened and deepened our views of the texts.

I saw Campbell, with the help of the tools and the subsequent change to my reading, as being an Enlightenment Quintilian, a teacher at heart who was interested in the ways that rhetoric is used the real world, for the betterment of both instructors and students. He also served as a sort of collector and compiler of wisdom and teaching in building on existing theory and philosophy, but in his synthesis he created new understandings on the practice of rhetoric. His grappling with the mind/body split through “passion” and “faculty,” two of our words, and how they were operators on the mind(s), body(ies), will(s), and epistimolgy(ies), became a good systemic framework for examining the function and teaching of rhetoric. By systematizing rhetoric, he moves it from the realm of only the educated (in his case preachers) into something that people, all people, do daily in important ways which is “framed for affecting the hearts or influencing the resolves of an assembly, needs greatly the assistance both of intellect and of imagination” (Campbell 902). While the book search was more difficult, the other tools helped to illustrate the ways in which Campbell built his position. He notes the connectedness of different discourses, and the means by which faculties and passions move the body and mind as they make and enact knowledge. This idea, combined with the connections between minds, and how they may move bodies.

It also had the effect of helping me see and understand the rhetorical basis of Locke, especially as he was not dealing with it directly in the same way. Given Locke’s interest in language, and the proto-semiotics that he develops, these trends in language usage have additional nuance as they travel and connect with one another and “yet the complex collective idea which every one thinks on or intends by that name, is apparently very different in mind using the same language” (Locke 819). That language is imperfect in its use. The tools made this clearly evident, as even with some context they meant little without reading and interpretation. I found Locke’s moralistic tone in the following quote important to his entire argument:

But I am apt to imagine, that, were the imperfections of language, as the instrument of knowledge, more thoroughly weighed, a great many of the controversies that make such a noise in the world, would of themselves cease; and the way to knowledge, and perhaps peace too, lie a great deal opener than it does (Locke 824).

This moralistic evaluation is then picked up by Campbell as he details his system of rhetoric. It attaches to language use and rhetoric what becomes an ideological struggle that the more modern theorists find and work through.

I was also struck with how much fun it was to play with the tools. It was an interesting practice to look at the machine reading data on its own and then work to analyze it working towards insights using all of our available means. It was difficult to say much of anything specific beyond general trends, but the tacking in/out was useful for having a multiplicity of perspectives on these texts, for examining their situated knowledge. This, combined with Haraway and Mao, helped to destabilize and “cultivate an intersubjective process where self and others engage in cross-cultural dialogue with an abiding sense of self-reflection, interdependence, and accountability” (Mao 48). The process of working with tools and texts, some we read and others we did not, created dialogues with ourselves and the materials. It revealed the moral and ethical underpinnings of rhetoric, while destabilizing the assumptions that rhetoric is or should be used in such ways.

There was also considerable difficulty in using the tools themselves. While there was a lot of date on the words themselves, how often they showed up, and what they showed up with, there was an obvious need for interpretation. On its own, these data were fairly meaningless. Given the readings that we had done, certain patterns were interesting in their presence or absence. It was also interesting to see the results in relationship to the larger use within the Google Books concordance:
This change of the word usage in printed texts is really interesting, especially in the subtle shifts over the decades. It raised more questions than answers. It would be interesting to do this sort of analysis on a longer scale or with different methods of searching. Using a tool like the ngram viewer through an examination of colocation, genre, and circulation could situate broader social trends in knowledge meaning.


The task helped to place prior knowledge of the enlightenment into a different context. It helped me to see previous work with Locke and Hume in a new light. I found that working with Jessi was also good, as we were able to talk through a number of possibilities and think through our data. There were a number of patterns and readings of the texts that we were both able to bring and negotiate throughout the process. It was interesting to see how different terms appeared, or didn’t, within the texts, and what that had to say about the explicit and implicit meanings within the texts. I also found the entire task destabilizing in a very productive way. I found myself reading with the terms in mind, and then turning very quickly to and from the terms while doing the exploratory.

Works Cited

Campbell, George. “From The Philosophy of Rhetoric.” The Rhetorcial Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2^nd ed., edited by Patricia Bizzell, Bruce Herzberg, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001, pp. 902-916, 923-938.

Haraway, Donna J. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1992, pp. 183-201.

Locke, John. “From An Essay Concerning Human Unerstanding.” The Rhetorcial Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2^nd ed., edited by Patricia Bizzell, Bruce Herzberg, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001, pp. 817-827.

Mao, LuMing. “Writing the Other into Histories of Rhetorics: Theorizing the Art of Recontextualization.” Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric. Edited by Michelle Ballif, Southern Illinois UP, pp. 41-57.

Kircsh, Gesa E., and Jacqueline J. Royster. “Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 640-672.