Ethan L. Gross

A Distant Reading of the Five Most Current Issues in the Journal Digital Humanities Quarterly (Final)

My method:

I took the bare article text (no images or interactives) from the five most current issues of the journal Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ), pasted them into separate Word documents, and then pasted them again into the tag cloud generator TagCrowd, producing clouds depicting the fifty most-frequented words in each respective article issue, and resulting in six total word clouds (one issue had such a large text file that I had to split the file in two, thus two separate clouds). I did the same for bibliographic text of each issue, making five separate Word documents and five separate word clouds. In total, I made eleven word clouds: six of bare article text, and five of bibliographic text. Upon pasting either article text or bibliographic text, I omitted three stop words that we as a class agreed upon based on frequency across all of our journals: "digital," "rhetoric," and "rhetorical."

Here are a few questions I'll respond to regarding my project:

1. What units of meaning does this method of reading help you apprehend?
2. What themes, patterns, or trends do you notice in and across your word clouds?
3. What questions, connections, patterns, or insights do they provoke?
4. How has this reading (and publishing) activity helped you make sense of “digital rhetoric” (whatever that is)?

Responses:

1. Generating ready-made word clouds is indeed a simple method for word watching. In this activity, I was able to discover the most frequently used words across journal issues. Yet these frequented words do not necessarily indicate frequency of particular units of meaning, as these words are highly used but for various different purposes in various scholarly activities. This means that while the words as signs themselves were revealed by the word clouds to be important, the word clouds only illustrate linguistic code frequency and not necessarily correlative, associative, meaning in-itself frequency, which is slippery and escapes quantification.
2. There are several common threads I notice across all five issues of DHQ. For one, the word clouds show that contributors to these issues are keenly aware of the journal they're in, and so "digital" and "humanities" are almost always the most common terms in the clouds. Also, all of the word clouds indicate a common reference to some sort of collectivity rather than a fixed text or thing in study. Though "text" is common among all clouds, even more common are terms of collectivity, materiality, and history.
3. These word clouds provoke many questions, such as that of in/exclusion in creation of the word clouds. In my own experience, I chose not to include the bibliographic material with the article issues, and instead to construct separate word clouds from this bibliographic material. My reason for doing this was to separate as much as possible the frequented authors, thinkers, and institutions from the frequented terms that are shaping disciplinary knowledge and research. I was also surprised to notice just how frequent conversations center on scholarship constrained to the university. Rarely do I see terms related to the economies and workplace demands of the outside world; "work" is the closest term we get to this, but I'm thinking it's mostly being referred to as work for research/university publication.
4. What is reading? In the case of this activity, the thin and distant reading I conducted while creating these word clouds involved a continual deference to meaning attribution to what a journal issue would ultimately be "about." Instead, the word clouds allowed me to see what terms are acting as conduits or intersects, indices even, of meaning assemblages across times and places. The result is instead of an orienting unified theory of an issue, I have a disorienting, fragmenting, heuristical set of images to consider and lead me to explore various corridors of continually changing meaning-complexes. That, I think, is the "digital" in digital rhetoric: to study the complex interactions of language users and their tools to accomplish contextualized goals and negotiate meanings across time in activity. These word clouds allow me to enter various pathways to further explore and enact richer methodologies to visit some of these corridors of meaning in fuller texture.

DHQ 2019 13.2: "Invisible Work in Digital Humanities" (preview)

"Archive," "Collective," and "Collaborative" are some key terms here, but "forms," "practices," "ways," and "individual" are terms that, although noticably smaller compared to the previous terms, suggests that the journal issue's concentration on the collective is not indicative of neglect in conversations about individual actors and their contributions in ongoing activity.

DHQ 2019 13.1

"Projects," "manuscripts," and "digital" are the most frequent terms, but I'm interested in terms like "battle," "funding," "infrastructure," and "scholarship," which suggest together a theme of institutional criticism.

DHQ 2018 12.4: "Information Visualization Pedagogy"

2018 12.3: "Technology in the Study of the Past"

2018 12.2: "Distracted Reading: Acts of Attention in the Age of the Internet"

Note: This issue was so long I had to split the full text in half. This is one of the unfortunate constraints of a program like TagCrowd.

Word Cloud 1/2

Word Cloud 2/2

Word Cloud FULL