Considering Worms.
A study of worm imagery in Romantic literature by Emily A. Scott
Process Posts: Week 1
​
Introduction: The following Process Posts detail the work accomplished thus far for my study on the appearances of the word “worm” within Romantic period literature. This project compiles archived Romantic texts from the database Hathitrust and runs a text analysis of the documents using the software Voyant. I have purposefully explained my work in a blog-like tone and format so to allow all audiences to comprehend the work plan that will eventually lead to my final conclusions. These posts also serve to outline my work plan for more adept Digital Humanities and Romantic scholars, so that feedback on this project is given with a complete understanding of the project’s methods and journey.
​
The Reflection section serves to document my later thoughts on my original process.
Process Posts
​
Oct. 26, 2017
Tonight, I spent an hour getting myself familiar with HathiTrust. So far, this database looks like it has many interesting materials I can use for my project, but the database is not easy to navigate. For example, I have yet to figure out how to view a plain-text version of the texts on HathiTrust; all of the documents are originally viewed on the database as digitized images. I will need to figure out this problem so that I can put the plain-text version of each document into Voyant. Right now, I can only view a little of the plain-text closest to the word “worm” when I search the texts for that word.
This problem aside, I did go ahead and map my parameters for my texts through HathiTrust. My main search term is “worm” for every text I will include in the project. I have further narrowed the search’s scope by specifying that I only want texts designated as “English Literature” or “Literature.” I still need to determine the time parameters of my texts – the earliest and latest date in my study – but right now the 11 works I have found date from approximately 1700 to the late 1800s. I spent another hour gathering these texts because the process for adding texts to a personal Collection on Hathitrust was not intuitive.
I hope to email Sarah Stanley tomorrow to set up an appointment to meet up and discuss some of the ways I can better navigate HathiTrust. I would also like to see if Sarah has any suggestions of any other resources I may want to use to gather my corpus of texts. And, if needed, I will ask Sarah about how to download the private version of Voyant so that I have the server on my own personal computer; that way the program will be able to analyze a larger body of texts than the regular web version.
Oct. 29, 2017
I spent another hour and a half today collecting texts on HathiTrust. This time, I searched some more works categorized with worm references in “English Literature” within the Romantic period and then began my search of works that reference worms categorized as “English poetry” from the Romantic period. Cumulatively, I now have 40 works collected in HathiTrust. Even though I have searched works by “English Literature,” “Literature,” and “English Poetry” now, I will be analyzing this data altogether in Voyant because it all falls under my umbrella scope of works within the Romantic period that mention “worm.”
​
To stay true to being open about my entire process throughout this project, I have set the collection of my Hathitrust texts, titled “Worm Imagery Study,” to public so that anyone with access to Hathitrust can view my collection.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Image 1. My public HathiTrust Collection.
​
I also emailed Sarah Stanley today. Hopefully, I will be meeting with Sarah on Tuesday, November 7th to figure out the best way to export my Hathitrust Collection to Voyant. I am having some difficulty on my own figuring out how to access the full plain-text versions of my collected texts. I have figured out how to view the plain-text around the sections of the texts that mention worms specifically, but not the whole texts. This is especially problematic because if I can only view the plain-text near the word “worm” in the texts, Hathitrust’s system will only let me view one word before the word “worm” and then a chunk of text after the word. I would ideally like to be able to view at least 5-7 words before the word “worm” in the texts so that I can better analyze my data in Voyant since I am interest in the relationship of the word “worm” to the text proceeding and following the word.
Reflection
​
I want to compare starting a Digital Humanities project for the first time to Odysseus setting sail on his first heroic adventure, or even his famous odyssey, and his feeling blissfully confident, unable to see the sirens and Charybdis ahead. There are so many aspects of this project I did not originally take into account such as why Hathitrust instead of other databases, why Voyant instead of other text analysis software, and why did I think this project would be easy.
I have begun to read Boris Groys's Under Suspicion to add to the bibliography page of this website and Groys makes a fair point: archives control history. Hathitrust only provides a limited scope for my project; it is a database for Romantic texts, but seems to include more periodicals, annuals, and poetry than novels. This has skewed my research and in the future I will draw sources from multiple databases so to have a more accurate pool of texts.
​
The farther I get in researching the bibliography for this project, the more I wish I had sat down and completed all my research before engaging in any other tasks. Luckily, the Collections in Hathitrust can be viewed by the public fairly easily; however, the politics of archives are not something I knew I needed to take into account until after doing research for my bibliography. To add to the subject of Groys's piece, I have also recently read Tom Nesmith's article, "Seeing Archives: Postmodernism and the Changing Intellectual Place of Archives." Nesmith describes the "role of archivists as key mediators or constructors of the knowledge available in archives (26). In other words, archivists are the gatekeepers - they determine whether a text should be included or not in an archive based on the archive's specific classification of its texts. According to the Postmodern approach to archives that Nesmith writes on, the public needs to carefully examine every mediator of the archival space because archives do not just house public-knowledge, they create it as well. (26-27).
​
By relying so heavily on Hathitrust, now I wonder how much my project is a reflection on the use of the word "worm" in Romantic texts and how much this study only reflects the use of the word "worm" in the texts in Hathitrust. There is some overlap in these two scenarios, but the latter is much more constrained than the former. If I could start this project from scratch I would probably use more than one archive to gather my texts because if I were to draw from more archives than one I believe it would help to decrease the prevailing politics that Hathitrust now projects onto my project.
​
However, I do not mean my discussion of archives to be an absolute rejection of archives. I also recently read Ron Chepesiuk's, "JSTOR and Electronic Archiving," and I understand how much the general public has benefited from having access to a large body of texts via archives that they did not have before the creation of archives. My role as a student would not be the same without archives, let alone just JSTOR. However, this project is definitely instructing me that no research tool provides only benefits but no drawbacks. There is no flawless, inconsequential system. As a student I have very little control over the system, but as a researcher, next time I will be more conscious of system politics.
​
On a final note, as for the difficulty of this project: I have quickly learned that what may seem like a quick solution in a DH project may very well be a dead end. Unlike a traditional research paper that has a general outline for the work that needs to be done, DH projects are more fluid, more labyrinth-like. A DH project is something you have to be willing to follow rabbit-holes for because (at least from what I am finding) there is hardly ever one straight path to completion or one right answer. I am sure that week two will come with just as many paths to choose from.