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Christopher Cammiso
Dr. Alan Liu
English 197
March 11th, 2014
Tracing Black Rhetoric
Introduction:
The advent of digital technology over the past century has engendered a great deal
of change in what it means to conduct research in the modern era. Television, computer
chips, and, of course, the Internet have fundamentally transformed the behavior of various
disciplines. Equally noteworthy is the exponential rate at which this technology is growing.
Although the hard sciences have made tremendous utility of these sudden innovations, it
can be argued that the humanities have struggled to grapple with the immense, seemingly
unrelated, tools placed at their disposal. This is not to say that no work has been done in
the digital humanities, nor is it to discredit what work has already been done – instead, it
speaks to the exciting possibilities that an intersection of liberal arts and technology
presents.
An emerging body of work in the field of English literature known as distant reading
testifies to the usefulness of this digitally assisted research. Whereas traditional close
reading focuses on single pieces of text, distant reading involves looking at entire corpuses.
Computational analytics sort through vast collections of literature to uncover trends,
frequencies, similarities, and the like. How can this information prove valuable to a
discipline that seems to champion personal insight over all else, one may ask? Well, while
the raw data is interesting in its own right, the conclusions researchers are able to extract
from such data help contextualize literature more thoroughly – often positioning it within a
larger cross-disciplined framework.
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Explanation Statement:
One of the more overlooked areas of literary studies, in my experience at least, has
to be the historical reflectivity of text. We often study literature with a concern for the
internal, not the external; that is, analysis tends to narrow in on how the text functions in
and of itself, but not how it functions reciprocally with the world at large. And yet, the
written word is as much a reflection of history as history is a reflection of written word.
With this in mind, I would like to propose a research project entitled Tracing Black
Rhetoric. The project would use the tools of distant reading, primarily that of topic
modeling, to explore the relation between African American literature and the progression
of civil rights in America.
Topic modeling is a process by which a system of algorithms discovers recurring
themes in a large corpus of inputted texts. One of the most basic topic modeling system is
called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Essentially, LDA searches a body of work for word
frequency. Consecutive or nearby terms are identified as “topics”, and the program then
measures how often these topics appear throughout the corpus. The result, researchers
are presented which elements of the corpus are most prevalent without having to close
read each individual work. Indeed, topic modeling is one of the few programs capable of
such large-scale analysis, but other digital tools provide similar distant reading methods.
The host of text visualizations offered by BookLamp.org, for instance, are also designed to
thematically gauge a book before someone actually picks it up to read. The development of
digital humanities relies on these sorts of computational analyses, and so too does my
project, Tracing Black Rhetoric.
As aforementioned, the primary interest of my project would be to examine the
relationship between the literary rhetoric of African Americans and the historical
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trajectory of civil rights in America. Ideally, I would like to compile an extremely extensive
body of written, spoken, and even sung work by African Americans beginning in the 1700’s
(age of colonial slavery), continuing through to 1968 (year of the Civil Rights Act), and even
to 2008 (election of President Barack Obama). Though a sophisticated program like
MALLET would be best suited for the execution of such a grand project, for the sake of our
theoretical proposal, the In-Browser Topic Modeling tool created by David Mimno would
suffice. After plugging the entire corpus into the system and running a series of iterations,
we would be presented with a list of words ranging from highest frequency to lowest
frequency. The system would also identify the most prevalent topics amidst the whole
collection. So, essentially, we would be provided with the words, issues, and ideas that
have most characterized the entire history of African American rhetoric. One might expect
the results of this initial analysis to turn up with an extreme frequency of central words like
“Black”, “slavery”, or “freedom”. But the core of my project, Tracing Black Rhetoric,
involves observing the gradual shift in African American language over time, or the
possible lack thereof.
We could then divide the corpus up according to time and run a topic model for each
of those periods. Here, I suspect that we may begin to see differences in topic frequency.
One of my main hypotheses is that the nearer we approached the 1960’s an appeal to logos
might become more dominant than an appeal to pathos; logically based arguments might
supersede emotionally based ones because at that point society, presumably already in
agreement over the evilness of discrimination, would only need to be convinced of its
illegality (a largely factually based discourse). Though, conversely, we might observe just
the opposite. Perhaps as 1968 drew nearer, passionately charged words were the final
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push needed to achieve full civil equality. Regardless, these are the type of correlations I
hope to seek out through Tracing Black Rhetoric.
Why were political activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X more effective
at rallying the public than others before them? How much overlap is there between the
literature of Southern and Northern African Americans? And, ultimately, might we explain
the achievement of civil rights as a product of changing rhetoric, or the other way around?
Surely, by changing the criteria of texts we insert into the topic modeling system, we may
be able to draw out conclusions to those questions and others similar. The final application
of my research would be to transpose the findings on a visual timeline of the civil rights
movement. Doing so would better demonstrate the causal link between historical
moments and the literary rhetoric associated with them.
The redeeming upshot of Tracing Black Rhetoric, however, is that we will be
afforded new cross-disciplinary knowledge no matter the results. I have assumed that
there would be a correlation between rhetoric and the progression of civil rights, but if it
turns out that there is none, or that the correlation is weak, we are in no worse of a
situation than when we started. A lack of correlation would certainly lead us to a unique
set of conclusions and would be valuable in its own right. In all, I feel this would be a
particularly interesting research project given the long-standing ever-changing nature of
African American text. Slaves expressed their torment in songs, newly liberated proved
their intellect through written literature, and political activists ushered in civil equality –
and they all relied on rhetoric to do so. Isn’t it natural to wonder how their words affected
history and vice versa? Isn’t Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, renown for his
captivating and eloquent rhetoric?
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Conceptual Vision Sketch
Figure 1
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Figure 2
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Figure 3
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