Why you might want to do data by hand

I’m working away on the networks that connected feminist thinkers in the 1970s, particularly attempting to understand how spoken presentations created a shared aural space, and brought in other people who were not physically present but were invoked by the speakers in a sort of precursor to what we would now call a “shout out” while live-tweeting an academic conference.

From PMLA Nov 1977

First I listened to the audiotapes of the 1977 Lesbians and Literature Panel at the MLA (at Lesbian Oral Herstory Archives digitized by Anthony Cocciolo and students in the digitization course he teaches at the Pratt School of Information and Library Sciences) and worked through the printed transcripts that appeared in Sinister Wisdom.  

from PMLA Nov 1971

Adrienne Rich in her talk traced the origins of the 1977 panel to Tillie Olsen’s 1971 presentation on a Women Writers in the Twentieth Century panel at the MLA .  Olsen is precisely one of those individuals who I’m looking for, someone incredibly influential, even as late as the 1980s when I was a young women’s studies student, but who is now pretty much a footnote, although her work on silences was important for the development of feminist literary theory.

JSTOR DFR graph # of items containing "Tillie Olsen"

As I read through the articles,  I began hand pulling names (rather than relying on NER like I normally do). I found 347 instances of people being named.  

Working manually forced me to think more purposefully about how I wanted to structure my data.  I needed to decide how to handle personal names in my data set.  This is always complicated for women under patriarchal naming practices.  I’ve been working recently on guidelines for doing ethical digital history and have been influenced by Katie Rawson’s suggestion that feminist data methods might involve adding to data rather than subtracting.   I also started thinking about how we name people signifies different affects.  Male authors or critics invoked by the speakers don’t necessarily require first names because they are so well known.  In the early 1970s, it was very difficult to find a woman writer of that stature.  The closest was probably Virginia Woolf, although she was still generally referred to by her full name (only critic Elaine Ruben referred to her simply as Woolf).  


I wondered what leaving the names un-reconciled to preserve these affects and statuses would do to network analyses that I hoped to create.  

network of names mentioned by speaker 1971 MLA

Above Tillie Olsen invoked so many names that she becomes the center of the network. More than one speaker named dead women writers like Jane Austen, Djuna Barnes,  Sylvia Plath, but also quite a few older living women who were bridges to 1970s feminism,  like Anais Nin who had some success prior to feminist literary critics picking them up as centerpieces of their new analysis.  The same is true of the few women critics who had found success such as Mary Ellmann and Diana Trilling. And of course, as always in these days, there was Virginia Woolf.

network of names mentioned by speaker 1971 MLA

Above is the smaller network from 1977, when the shorter session meant shorter presentations and less women named.  This network is anchored around Adrienne Rich.  There are fewer names in common and the speakers mention one another more frequently.  That may be due to the close bonds of friendship between these women. 


Below I've started combining the networks.  Immediately an issue with my name data becomes clear

In the above detail the speaker Julia P. Stanley is not associated with the person invoked Julia Stanley. Further complicating matters, Stanley published as Julia Penelope as well.

Because Ellen Peck Killoh presented a paper only on Anais Nin, she began referring to her as "Nin."  While "Anais Nin" links Killoh to Adrienne Rich, she also appears in Killoh's network as two more entities "anais" and "nin".  Does this matter? or is it more important to realize that Nin became knowable by surname alone indicating a shift to an elevated status, much like Woolf enjoyed already?  

1. The 1971 panel had two full hours while the 1977 panel had only an hour and fifteen minutes.