Third in a series of
transatlantic e-collaboration and learning from the fabulous Heather Froelich
(@heatherfro) (earlier lessons here and here)
Bolded for the TL:DR crowd
I’ve already blogged about
my search for the entry of “essentialism” into Anglophone feminist discourse
using JSTOR’s new beta search. However
since I’m committed to writing an intellectual history of the rise and fall of
women’s culture that relies on grassroots as well as feminists inside academia,
that means another tool beyond JSTOR.
Off Our Backs (OOB), a grassroots women’s liberation newspaper, appears in the JSTOR database, but the
search function reveals only that “essentialism” appears fifteen times, the
earliest in 1984. Given the results of
my analysis on academic feminist journals, it might appear that academics
introduced the idea of essentialism to grassroots feminism. However I know essentialism was an issue
earlier for grassroots feminists who likely labeled the word “essentialism” as
jargon. So I’m left trying to figure out
other ways to get at essentialism discourse in OOB.
Enter AntConc to help me
figure out which of 1839 full text articles I have via JSTOR for education from
OOB 1977-1981, a pivotal era in my book manuscript, that might have
information about essentialism, even if the word itself doesn’t appear.
AntConc can help me by
finding collocates, a linguistic term that refers to patterns of word
usage in a body of texts. However, as McEnery and Hardie
point out in Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice, “once we move beyond basic generalities and attempt to pin down
collocation operationally or conceptually, we find a great multitude of
different definitions.”[1]
Sinclair defines collocation as words
that occur in relation to a “node” “within a specified span.”[2]
Translation: node = word you are
interested in, specified span = 1 word to the left, 2 words to the right, 3
words to the left, 3 words to the right,
Now we have a definition of a
collocate is, but how does Antconc determine collocates? Sinclair, quoted in McEnery
and Hardie, explains collocation as determined by “the length of the text in which the words appear, the number of times they both appear in
the text, and the number of times they occur together. “[3]
Great, so now all I need to
decide is what “node word” to use. As discussion
of “biological determinism” is one of the earliest debates about essentialism
in feminist discourse I decide to use "biological."
Using Antconc, I see “biological”
appears in thirty-four files, which is better than the 1839 file
I started with, but still a lot for me to read closely.[4]
Using collocates I hope to narrow that further. However, there
are a total of 76 collocate types and collocate tokens 162.[5]
In the sentences that
include the word “biological” there are 162 tokens (all words) and the software
has determine that 76 are “potential” collocate types (unique words), shown below.
Anconc by default ranks the
potential collocates by frequency order (first two columns) and then indicates
whether the potential collocate appears to the L or R of the node word. The stat column gives us
the significance expressed as (using the default setting) “a 'Mutual Information' score, which is
a measure of the probability that the
collocate and the node word occur near each other, relative to how many times
they each occur in total.) Antconc already “interprets” the relative
significance, but here is more information 'Mutual
Information' score
in case you are curious.
I however want the
results sorted by the stat column because “the higher the score
the stronger the association between the two.”
Using the “sort by” function, set to “stat” give us the results we want
in the order we want. Among the highest
collocates are variations on “biological determinism” which is excellent, as I
know in feminist theory biological determinism is a subset of
essentialism.
Clicking on determinism (below)
to see the word in context reveals not only biological, but also two instances
of “hormonal determinism,” which I think of as a subset of “biological determinism.” Using the last column I can see the file
names in which these words appear. Since
my plan here is to narrow the 34 files down to those that deserve a close
reading, I jot then down. I see also a file containing “biological explanation,”
and note that as well.
I’m intrigued also by
“difference” as a potential collocate, but clicking on that to reveal the context
causes a problem as it appears too many times for me to scan. Using the concordance tab, I search for “biological difference” and note relevant
files.
Heather’s first lesson: look not only at what I hoped
or expected to find, but to look at what is unexpected or contradictory. So I return to the results. Hmmm “sex” appears four times with a SMI
about half of the determinism variants, but still "biological sex" seems like it
could be related to essentialist arguments so I add the two articles in which
it appears to my list. "Biological constraints" also looks intriguing and as that
file isn’t on my list yet, I add it.
Heather’s second lesson: learn to love the “small
words,” so I click on “or” expecting
to find something like “biological or social,” but I find “biological or sexual”
and “biological or relatively static characteristics,” both of which intrigue
me so files added to list. “Of” could be
interesting but gets me articles I’ve already selected for close reading (same
for “on”).
Ultimately, of the
thirty-four articles that contained “biological,” I’ve used collocates to
narrow to sixteen those deserving a close reading (some things just cannot be done digitally,
third lesson from Heather, see blog
post). While this may not seem
like a big deal, I know from past
experience that reading OOB is time consuming and these sixteen results will
probably take two days of close reading, and I've therefore saved myself an additional two days of close reading.
Resources: Antconc Basic youtube, Antconc advanced youtube
Resources: Antconc Basic youtube, Antconc advanced youtube
[1] Tony McEnery and Andrew Hardie, Corpus
Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press,
2011).
[2] John Sinclair, Susan Jones, and Robert
Daley, English Collocation Studies: The OSTI Report (Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2004).
[3] McEnery and Hardie, Corpus Linguistics.
[5]
In the default
settings of antconc, span is set for the smallest span, words that appear right
before biological (1L) and immediately after 1R and for the lowest frequency,
1.
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