Ex 3: Finding Enlightenment Terms

Weekly 3 Exploratory: Finding Enlightenment Terms in Concordances, Databases, & Ontologies

(Warning: Instructions appear longer than they are!) For your next exploratory assignment, I invite you to work in teams to try on a series of digital research tools intended to help us track uses and patterns, and waxing and waning of key terms, and then to reflect on their d/evolution. We will try to consider the many factors that cause terms to (appear to) wax or wane, and perhaps connect those considerations with some developments in rhetorical theory. We'll be particularly interested in terms of Enlightenment thinking, or terms that foreshadow Enlightenment thinking for the texts that we read.

However, we will be just as interested in the affordances and constraints of tools themselves, since tracking terms is a finite exercise that can lead to more imaginative activities or re-orientations to what we read, but that's where the critical work really is. In a way, what we are doing is a very primitive form of algorithmic text-mining or topic modeling -- something quicker that requires fewer installs and a lower barrier of entry.

Here are our tools and tasks:

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts
We'll be using the digital concordance, which calculates “counts” on search terms in order to show their proximity to other terms and/or to each other within a single text. I'll ask each team to select one of the word sets below as your corpus:

• Virtue, civil/ity, logic, probability, communication, nature, history
• Perception, learning, writing, language, philosophy
• Science, reason, sensation, passion, education
• Passion, mind, body, state, project, faculty 

1. Navigate to the concordance. (This is also linked from our Resources for Study page.)
2. If you have never visited Alex before, I recommend browsing around by “author” or “title” just to get a sense of its coverage. I also highly recommend visiting “Alex, the Movie!” and Infomotion's “Blog” page to learn more about its origins, developments, and use, and also to learn more about how you will interpret your search results, as it isn't always evident from within the tool.
3. We are in search of Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and David Hume's Of Essay Writing or An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. (You choose. We did not read either of those texts by Hume, but we'll search them for points of comparison.) You can find each text at a time, browsing by “author” or “title,” or you can type the full title into the search bar.
4. Once you are on the title page for Locke's or Hume's texts, under “Services” select “evaluate using concordance.” Then, search for one word in your set, and change the radius/number of words to “500” (or higher) in order to increase the number of characters surrounding the context of your word.
5. For alternate views, click “show map” and “visualize results,” changing the parameters of the visualization if you wish, and clicking on “usage tips” or “matrix” for help with interpreting the visualizations.
6. Note the number of “counts” you get for each of your terms and comment on anything else that strikes you, including frequent collocations , its various meanings, and/or the contexts in which it appears. In addition to forming conclusions about each individual word, try also to form some conclusions about the word sets as you observe them. Take note of some of the differences between and among your findings. This may take some time and reflection, i.e., try not to worry if you don't have a good sense of this within the first five minutes. (You might be interested to read about WordHoard, which is a similar kind of concordance tool.)

The Internet Archive
We'll be using the digital text repository at The Internet Archive (which is, in many ways, an Internet aggregator), to do something similar to concordance searching, and this is out of sheer necessity. We're in search of a full online version of George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric and can only find it here.

1. Navigate to the Archive.
2. In the search bar at top right, type in the full title for The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Browse around the record for a bit, noting what other versions are available. 
3. It should open automatically in an e-reader, but if for any reason it does not, select “read online” to open up an e-reader, and once the book is “open” in digital form, you can click on the white “search inside” icon to search for your terms.
4. Try the same set of terms as the set you chose above, and just make note of what you can about how and where they appear, whether they appear in conjunction to each other, and anything else that strikes you.

Google Ngram Viewer
We're trying this on as a “distant reading” tool, although I think the tool tells us far less than needed, and we will have to make some inferences. Still, it raises interesting possibilities for studying the waxing and waning of terms, labels, disciplinary placeholders, and the like.

1. Navigate to the Viewer.
2. Take a moment to read "About Ngram Viewer" so that you know how to interpret your results.
3. Set parameters for starting and ending dates (you can do this for centuries, decades, years, etc.), with the understanding that you are setting parameters for dates of published texts, since this is essentially mining the Google Books repository for things printed between those dates.
4. Feel free to change smoothing to show less or more detail in the graph.
5. Finally, enter in your string of search terms from above separated by commas. (You may also trace each term individually for different views.) After using your word set from above, feel free to search for the names of particular theorists or historical figures, or the titles of their texts. Go wild. 

Presenting Your Exploratory Results
You may report your results in any way that makes the most sense to show the waxing and waning of key terms, theorists, and historical figures; to report patterns and occurrences, disappearances or omissions, surprises; and etc. I say this to remove your anxiety, not to increase it. Seriously, find a way to present the results of your searching that points to a compelling realization about how language moves through these digital tools or doesn't, and how names and labels may move through these tools or not (e.g., screen-shots, visualizations, graphs, tables, prezi, PPT, etc.)

Feel free to consider what kinds of reading practices or historical queries each one encourages, or obscures. And finally, feel free to consider what other kinds of critical or imaginative possibilities you note in using these tools.

Please upload your completed presentation to Canvas by the beginning of class time on Thursday, October 6, and bring a hard or digital copy to class for our discussion (just in case). 

I'll suggest the following working teams for this exploratory:

• Katelyn, Mandy, Parisa
• Jessi, Michael
• Amanda, Rob
• Angela, Kamila

The Critical Blog Post
For your follow-up critical blog post (which you will do individually), please reflect on the concordance assignment and how some aspect of the task illumined/complicated/addressed/extended your reading of our texts for this week. This critical blog post can be reflective but should be formal. It should be a minimum of 2-3 well developed paragraphs in length (a couple of screens), and my great desire is to see you engage expertly with both task and texts, at times speaking through or alongside what we read, and speaking with some insight about what we read (citing where necessary and embedding links where relevant). As your post will be intertextual, I'll ask you to use MLA or Chicago-style parenthetical citations where needed, and to be clear that we know which articles/authors you are referencing.

You will post directly to our course blog, so what you write will become the temporary landing page. Be sure to define terms and unpack assumptions for us, using your posts as occasions to teach. Because the blog is somewhat performative, I'll ask you to title your posts creatively (or insightfully). Feel free to compose your post as a response to someone else’s, if you see an interesting conversation starting on the blog. Reminder: this post isn't due until 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 8.

Enjoy the task, yet again!