The Story of One: Humanity scholarship with visualization and text analysis

Most critiques of The Making of Americas (Paris 1925) by Gertrude Stein contend that the text deconstructs the role narrative plays in determining identity by using indeterminacy to challenge readerly subjectivity. The current perception of Making as a postmodern text relies on the notion that there is a tension created by frustrated expectations that result from the text's progressive disbandment of story and plot as the narrative unweaves into seemingly chaotic, meaningless rounds of repetitive words and phrases. Yet, a new perspective that is facilitated by digital tools and based on the highly structured nature of the text suggests that these instabilities can be resolved by the same seemingly nonsensical, non-narrative structures. Seeing the manner in which the structure of the text makes meaning in conversation with narrative alleviates perceived instabilities in the discourse. The discourse about identity formation is engaged—not dissolved in indeterminacy—to the extent that the reader can read the composition. One method for reading the composition of the text without relying on what becomes a non-existent framework based on plot is to view the progression of words according to a different framework, a framework that relies on comparative associations based on word usage. Using WordHoard, i we compared word usage between texts and text parts by calculating the log-likelihood ratio, which describes the size and significance of the difference between word frequencies in a base text versus a reference text. ii In this analysis, we measured word usage in The Making of Americans in comparison to two different sets of reference texts with more traditional narrative structures: (a) a set of 19 th century novels written (b) between the first and second half of Making, which it has been argued also represents different narrative trends (Clement 2008). Visualizing this information in Wordle iv —a word cloud application (Wattenberg & Viegas, 2008)—is useful primarily because it provides a visual overview of word frequencies that is easy to understand and to publish for reference. The Wordle application facilitates this kind of analysis by visualizing the list of words in a cloud that maximizes the space utilization on a computer screen by sizing the words by their relative frequencies. The more frequently a word occurs in a particular text (relative to another text) the larger the word appears. In the set of visualizations that accompany this discussion, v each cloud serves to visualize words that are more or less frequent …