As we’ve begun to scale up our efforts this summer, we have eight full-time research assistants on the 500 Novels project. We’ve been undergoing lots of changes and developments! In order to start off our summer session, here’s a post.
This project, Tagging 500 Novels, seeks to analyze the ways in which physical space and mental constructions of location have worked to organize and represent changing experiences of the city throughout the nineteenth century, a period marked by both a democratization of the novel and rapid urbanization. Specifically, this project will focus on the emotions associated with particular urban locales in London during the nineteenth century, where “the narrative system becomes complicated, unstable: the city turns into a gigantic roulette table, where helpers and antagonists mix in unpredictable combinations” (Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 68). Where there once existed one story, centered on the communal experiences of an insular town’s inhabitants, now a different narrative structure must emerge from the crowd - one that can accommodate the emotional intensity associated with shifting allegiances, geographic displacement, and class antagonisms as lower, middle, and upper classes collide in this newfound urban space. By tracking and mapping these fluctuations in characters’ emotional lives, Tagging 500 Novels hopes to search for connections among particular places and arrive at possible explanations for these trends.
The project has changed slightly from its initial conception. The major change we have experienced is a shift away from social networking toward emotions, gender, and class. We previously wanted taggers to perform anaphora resolution: for each pronoun, find its antecedent (he-->Lord Filroy), as well as annotate each instance of dialogue with regard to the speaker and recipient. Anaphora resolution proved too time-consuming, and it introduced hermeneutical problems that could possibly detract from the other tasks we were asking our taggers to perform. For example, discerning the recipient of dialogue requires contextual knowledge only obtained by reading the entire novel. We found that the best tasks were ones which required no prior knowledge of the literature or of English customs during the nineteenth century.
Moving forward, here are some of our preliminary hypotheses and questions:
-Which regions of the city are most represented? Are some locales predominantly referred to or imagined, rather than rendered explicitly in the narrative?
- Does the spatial representation of certain kinds of emotional experience correlate to known class divisions in the city? Can we anticipate the rise of what Franco Moretti has called the “Third London,” a middle-class “wedge” in the city, through changing fictional representations of this region?
- Do characters of different genders or social classes have different spatial distributions, and if so, what would this mean? Does the mobility of women in fiction increase over time due to rising women’s activity in the public sphere?
In order to investigate these wide-reaching research questions, this project has diverged from traditional humanities research in four distinct ways: by making use of distant reading techniques to glean patterns from hundreds of texts; by using crowdsourcing to gather data from distributed human readers that would be impossible to collect by a computer; by emphasizing the role of space as an actor within literary history; and by attempting to trace changes in the emotional experience of fictional characters navigating physical space.
In our future posts, we will unpack each of these divergent aspects in detail. Stay tuned for “What is distant reading?”
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