Due to the spread of the Coronavirus, COVID-19, most countries worldwide are in a lockdown state, and people aren’t advised, and some not even allowed, to leave their homes. This is the case in Lebanon, where we, as students, haven’t been to AUB campus for around 2 months now. However, universities have equipped themselves with the knowledge and tools to approach such a crisis from a different angle. Instead of cancelling classes, universities around the world sent their students home and resorted to another approach called distance learning where students would attend online lectures, submit their assignments online, and sit for online tests.
As part of adapting all our courses to this new approach, our professor had to alter our targets and goals in ENGL256D, such as altering our Digital Humanities (DH) course project. Instead of having to choose between 3 types of projects (Books project, Archival materials project, and Orientalist project), we are now restricted to go forth with the Orientalist themed project. This is due to the reason that the first 2 projects required human interaction for interviews and visiting libraries on campus, both of which are out of the equation now.
Moreover, the final project we have been tasked with for our ENGL256D course this semester revolves around orientalists and Orientalism. We were given four options to decide from in order to complete this project, each requiring its own tools and aiming to delve into a specific aspect of orientalists. All the given options were tempting: Briefly, one option includes using Palladio to perform a network analysis (study the networks of relationships between orientalists and try to classify them according to gender, genre, etc,); another option includes mapping the movements of orientalists (using Google My Maps for example), as well as their books and trying to figure out how do different genres and texts relate to specific places. A more comprehensive option required cleaning up, expanding, and further building our class Orientalist spreadsheet and developing more ideas on the way. Finally, the option we chose to pursue revolved around conducting textual analysis by using Antconc to check for patterns and developments in vocabulary, word trends, and attitudes of our chosen orientalists.
By Antconc, which is the most important aspect of our project, is a freeware concordance program with several tools developed by Professor Laurence Anthony. One of its various tools, and the one we’ll be relying on heavily to ensure the success of our project, is the concordance tool which allows us to see the words present in a text, the frequency they appear in, and the context of each. This is known as textual analysis, which is a method that revolves around understanding the language used in texts in order to gain information on how people used to communicate life and its experiences. However, in our project, we will group our chosen texts into corpora, and perform analysis on those corpora, known as corpus analysis.
Corpus analysis is a form of textual analysis which allows you to make comparisons between large scale textual objects which is commonly known as distance reading. It allows us to see things that we don’t necessarily see when reading as humans and test hypotheses about texts. This will be extremely useful when trying to answer our research questions mentioned below, so keep going to find out more!
Because this project had a wide variety of topics to choose from, such as the orientalist’s origin, gender, writing genre, time era, etc., we won’t deny that we felt a bit overwhelmed at the start of the project. However, after careful consideration, we decided that our project would focus on two main dimensions, the time period and the author’s country of origin. We chose to look at authors from the UK and those from the USA, to analyse and compare the word trends and writings of authors from these two different countries and continents. This would show whether UK and USA had similar or different vocabularies and word choices, as well as their attitude to the Orient.
We won’t deny that we felt a bit overwhelmed at the start of the project, not due to its difficulty, rather due to the huge range of topics to tackle directly in our project. However, after careful consideration, we decided that our project would focus on two main dimensions, the time period, and the author’s country of origin.
We chose to look at authors from the UK and those from the USA, to analyse and compare the word trends and writings of authors from these two different countries and continents. This would show whether UK and USA had similar or different vocabularies and word choices, as well as their attitude to the Orient.
We also chose two time periods for our books’ dates of publishing: before 1860 and after 1910. This would also allow us to detect changes in word choice and writing styles over time in each of the UK and the US, and the reason we chose those specific dates was to create a time gap large enough to notice interesting and apparent changes.
Moreover, these 2 categories together (time and origin), each of which has 2 levels, will allow us to also compare the progress of orientalist writings between UK and USA and detect any growing similarities or drifting differences that writers of these 2 origins would have developed over time (especially with the increasing contact between countries and continents over that length period of time).
We started our project by gathering data and forming an orientalist spreadsheet which is made up of various orientalist books written by UK and USA authors during the time periods we chose to study. We got those specific texts from the comprehensive class orientalist spreadsheet. This led us to noticing an interesting aspect which is that UK authors are significantly more than USA authors, especially during the time period before 1860. We still don’t know if that’s the case in general or only in the spreadsheet provided; however, it does make sense considering the distance UK and USA authors would have to travel, especially since traveling used to be an actual gruelling journey. The journey USA authors had to take was a significantly harder, riskier, and more dangerous than that of the UK authors.
Then, we formed our corpus by downloading the various texts from the Gutenberg Project website, and then cleaning our date before uploading them to our shared project file (removing any additional information such as “boilerplate” or standard headers and footers that will throw off our analysis). Finally, we formed many subgroups of corpora, each according to the subgroups mentioned above i.e. one for UK writings, another for USA writings, another for writings before 1860, etc. This will help us compare word trends between these specific corpora and finally answer our research questions and reach our final results.
Additionally, we will aim at cleaning up more texts from the Gutenberg Project database, specifically texts under the genres of religion and military to add to our project and spice it up a bit, since these 2 genres are likely to have different attitudes towards the Orient.
So, stay tuned to find out what connections, differences, and progresses the orientalist movement developed over that period, as well as any progress regarding our latest findings! And more importantly for now, STAY HOME, STAY SAFE!
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