Race, Writing, and Computation: Racial Difference and the US Novel, 1880-2000

Bibliography

So, R. J., Long, H., & Zhu, Y. (n.d.). Race, Writing, and Computation: Racial Difference and the US Novel, 1880-2000.

Notes

Notes 2023-04-30

Go to annotation“This article seeks to bridge two scholarly fields often seen as incommensurable: cultural analytics (also known as “computational criticism”) and critical race studies.1 It does so by discovering generative points of contact between two sets Go to annotationof methods that are also typically viewed as antithetical: data science and critique.” (So et al., p. 2)

Go to annotation“Importantly, prior to doing so, the program removes high frequency stopwords, short words, and numerals, and can also normalize accents and spelling. This preprocessing eliminates minor textual variations or elisions to allow for more matches” (So et al., p. 11)

Such processes of removing information in order to make the corpus compareable very likely introduce adulterations into the texts. Have these ever been measured?

  • The King James bible seemed fundamental to both categories of writers, but no differences in quotations were found
  • …when just using the methodological standards
  • …but can be found when going for sociality

See also