Experiment

Text mining of the most relevant blogs and websites about Spanish “Indignados” movement using Voyant-Tools.

Selection criterion: Official websites of the movement compiled in https://movimientoindignadosspanishrevolution.wordpress.com/paginas-web-oficiales-del-15m-en-espana/

Official means, in this case, the websites that came directly from the organization (squares and other spontaneous places for meetings)

Defining a corpus is not easy; that’s why it is useful to build upon a previously made selection.

Purpose of the experiment: Search for the most common buzzwords or theoretical concepts related to the movement and gathered in its blogs and websites. They will be extracted from the list of terms within the first 250. Words that are not relevant for the experiment (as verbs; prepositions; or names of people, places, months or days) will not be taken into account.

Limitations

First of all, it should be pointed out that some of the websites and blogs are not active anymore (perhaps they can be retrieved using internet archive). Moreover, some of the domains belong now to other business or even to other countries. Last but not least, other sites are blocked because of their political content (especially in the U.S.).

Voyant-Tools proves unable to move all the corpus (perhaps due to the abovementioned limitations). Then I decided to conduct the experiment splitting the corpus in chunks. That option did not work either; so, I opted for extracting the malfunctioning links from the corpus. It rendered the same error. Finally, facing the impossibility of analyzing a comprehensive corpus, I took the decision to include only 20 websites, which would represent some of the biggest cities of Spain. After doing that, I was able to visualize the data.

Interpreting the results

Some of the most abundant concepts were Assembly, Consensus, Commission, Share, Proposal(s), Camp, Twitter, Facebook, Minutes, and Plaza. Other buzzwords  in the list of the 100 more used were Evictions, 15m, Compañeros, Demonstration, Repression…

When the link map is displayed the results that are shown are by no means contradictory. It seems obvious that Assembly is connected to General, Commissions and Inter. Likewise, it comes as no surprise that Share is associated with Facebook, Twitter, Blog, and Pinterest.

Looking at the bubble lines, one can unfortunately realize that the outputs are manly concentrated in a few websites (Bilbao, Soria, Salamanca, Gudadalajara, and Vigo); most probably as a result of being more text mining friendly. That could simply have occurred because of presenting more text in their home tab.

One of the unusual findings is that Share  is the most used concept (98 times) followed by Assembly (56 times). Thus, one can conclude that text mining tools applied to social movements’ archives help discover largely used words which give account of concepts that shape collective political subjectivities and that are propably unnoticed. For instance, quantitave analysis shows that Share not only has a practical use, connected to the idea of spreading the word through social media, it also portrays the idea of a sharing community.

It is clear that for a proper analysis, the selection and preparation of the corpus is fundamental. The rendering of the data is affected by minimal changes on the corpus. Perhanps my modest experiment with Voyant cannot serve the purpose of generalizing assumptions. In this respect, the relationship between signals and concepts was not fully developed and appeared as weak in my case study. However, signals such as Consensus, Assembly, Share, Proposal or Plaza configured a linguistic map around certain concepts that are definitely related to the new political subjectivity of the “Indignados” movement. Some of them were evident, other surprising, and many remain undiscover, waiting for future reserarches.

I’ve been excited about multimodal composing since stumbling on Jackie Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander’s work on queer web texts in On Multimodality (CCCC/NCTE) back in 2016. That semester, in Tom Peele’s Rhetorical Theories and Composition Theories course at CCNY, I dove into the wild world of theorizing digital writing as situationist, activist, and queer AF.

Rhodes and Alexander discuss their own work towards practicing the queering of texts that they theorize in the text, but the chapter that really thrilled me focused on Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and theories of dérive and détournement as they relate to queer webtexts and digital composing. Essentially, Debord viewed dismantling and re-purposing, ignoring the original intention of a space or text, as crucial to creating a situationist cultural ethos. Rhodes and Alexander respond by dis-composing, the rhet/comp incarnation of détournement, by taking texts and intentionally stripping order and even meaning from the writing.

On the train home that night, I frantically googled free coding classes, “détournement for Dummies,” anything to help me do this. I ended up stumbling into it on Twitter: Weird Twitter, a now-mostly-defunct movement of surrealism and un-meaning through genre manipulation, had been doing this work for years. Thus, riceevansdis-composed.tumblr.com was born.

I’ve always been into computer stuff. I coded my MySpace AND LiveJournal(s) with a custom background, color scheme, font, proto-emojis, an avatar, stuff to get my crush’s digital attention, etc.

JRE Livejournal layout

(uh oh, my background image!)

JRE Livejournal post

Once I realized that this impulse had always come from a place of loving to experiment, that I could play with rhetorical strategies in these multimodal formats that I’d always loved, I caught the bug again. Hard. Since, I’ve developed my own slew of playful online texts: an interactive memoir, the aforementioned messy theory-in-progress, a cleaner but fictionalized chap of poems.

Rhodes and Alexander swiftly followed On Multimodality with a fully-online multimedia piece titled TECHNE: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self (Computers and Composition Digital Press), which took their theorizing about the need for instructors to actually do some multimodal writing into practice. TECHNE is a wild mash-up of practice and abandon: a navigable webtext with integrated images, video, and audio. Rhodes and Alexander manage to maintain citation practices while incorporating their own original written & multimedia scholarship, including some weird arty video work run through iMovie’s slow-motion tool.

From TECHNE

The thing that excites me most is how Rhodes and Alexander are breaking apart the standard essay/article form used across humanities scholarship, even in decidedly critical intellectual spaces: crit theory, cultural studies, critical university studies, comp/rhet. Because while we all talk a big game about experimenting with form and pedagogy, we still write in the same tedious, exclusionary forms we always have.

Break *clap emoji* this *clap emoji* shit *clap emoji* up.

It was great meeting you all on Tuesday!  As we introduced ourselves, I noticed that many students had (often extensive) digital experience/knowledge already.  Also, I noticed that nearly everyone expressed a need/desire to somehow enhance/ground/expand their existing DH knowledge by taking this class–a more formal/(traditional?) kind of process/structure/way of producing knowledge in the humanities.  I was thinking that these observations might speak to what Matt was saying about how DH “activities” represent different ways of knowing/forms of knowledge.  I’m wondering whether my own feeling that the digital/DH knowledge I have is somehow not legitimate is due to the fact that it was not gained/produced in the same way/through the same process as humanities knowledge and does not look or feel like that kind of knowledge either.  Also, does this lack of confidence in existing digital knowledge in part maybe come from pressure from outside (and even inside) DH to always somehow “prove” what we know?