Cristina Vănoagă Pop
“1 Decembrie 1918” University, Alba Iulia, Romania
cristinamatilda@yahoo.com
The E-researcher
Abstract: Our paper introduces a new term – the e-researcher, which in our definition is a term defining the researcher who uses virtual tools as part of their activity. The pertinence and the extension of this type of research is also discussed, using a comparison between two types of analyses of the literary text. The first type of analysis is a classical one, based on the text, some bibliography and the inspiration of the researcher, the second uses a dedicated software called Tropes. Both analyses are performed on an essay written by Andrei Codrescu.
Keywords: E-researcher; Literary analysis; Software tools; Tropes; Andrei Codrescu.
The smell of new books… every person that loves to read knows it and most of the readers like it. But that is about to change in the digital age on account of e-books and many types of machines for reading electronic texts. Is literature perceived in the digital age the same as it used to be? Readers now have the advantage of cheaper books, because the costs for editing e-books are considerably smaller. To purchase an e-book is cheaper than purchasing the same book on paper. But how does the research community react to e-literature? There is no doubt that the digital era has opened a wider communication, letters between researchers becoming obsolete in favour of e-mails. Scientific debates are often continued in virtual space, on various forums or other discussion platforms. The myth of the researcher covered in clouds of dust in libraries and archives is about to disappear. Many libraries are scanning the content of the books and magazines, no matter how ancient, and are offering them to the reader in the form of e-text, which opens for researchers the possibility to use software tools to interpret the literary works they choose. Some of the digital era theories sustain that virtual space is a component of everyday life, each of us using virtuality as an extension for our personality and work. We intend to analyze the way virtual tools are or not a possible prolongation of the literature researcher, creating a new breed – the e-researcher.
We therefore present a research experiment that compares a literary text analysis in two different manners. The first manner is the old-fashioned manner of analysing literature, using the literary text from a book, a bibliography, the knowledge and the intellectual capacity of the human researcher. The analysed text is Against Photography, an essay written by Andrei Codrescu[1]. The second manner of analysis is using specialized software, called Tropes[2], whose exact presentation is better defined by its reference manual: “What is the content of a text? Or to be more precise: what are the core elements which must be identified in order to grasp the essential meaning of a text? Whether it is a press article, a book, a speech, or any other sequence of language, every text contains a few key sentences conveying the ideas that make up its framework: its skeletal structure. The problem, then, is to locate this central core of the text that holds the essentials of its meaning. This is the crucial first step, before any attempt at interpretation can be made” and “Content analysis, then, applies a set of techniques to a given text to determine: the identity of the main actors, the Relations in which they stand to each other, the hierarchy of these Relations and how they evolve.”[3]
The first manner of analysis depicts the way photography influenced Andrei Codrescu’s view upon life and creation. Some general outlines for this type of analysis, centred on the symbol of photography and related items, as we observed them, are presented as follows.
Andrei Codrescu spent his childhood watching his parents taking pictures, but also taking imaginary pictures through his own eyes. Both his parents were photographers. The professional environment receives an ontological value for the appearance of the human entity. “My mother and father spent most of the six months that they were married to each other in the darkroom of the photo shop. I was no doubt conceived in the darkroom. And afterwards, I baked there inside my mother under the steady red light for six full months, the time I believe that it takes most major organs and most of the brain to form. My outline must have been there in any case, as well as certain vital shadows.”[4] A correlation is created between the intrauterine environment and the photo shop environment, both being characterized by darkness and warmth. The obscure room becomes for Codrescu an equivalent of the cave or other mystical symbols of the intrauterine life, a symbol of the total protection the foetus is feeling and subconsciously misses throughout life after birth.
The adult Codrescu will later search for darkness that is full of life, explaining this way his preference for the cities that are very active at night, like New Orleans is. The red light may be considered an initiating light, a Self forming light, and many revelatory experiences signal the presence of light as part of the process. As in any other processes of this type, the separation from the revelatory experience is felt as a shock. “I was then violently wrenched into the light by my parents’ divorce”.[5] The departure of the mother from the photo shop and its red light represents the entrance into another type of light, with its own significance, the parents’ divorce and the daylight influencing the later relationship between the son and the father.
Some time after giving birth to Andrei, the mother opens her own photo shop, called Baby, after her moniker. A predestined name, Baby will influence Codrescu’s world as a child. The camera, the main instrument of a photographer, opens for him the gate to The Other and also the gate to Self. The writer speaks about the dichotomy that represents him: “I Am a Camera” vs. “I Am a Picture”, the last hypostasis being preponderant sometimes, especially as regards the relationship with his mother. While the mother was photographing the world through the lens of the camera, the child was photographing the world through his eyes. But periodically he used to get in front of the camera as a model for his mother. Several faces and body positions were changed until the mother chose one of them as worthy of being immortalised by the camera: the perfect figure of the son as an equivalent for the perfect son. Changing positions and expressions, the son is glad to receive the mother’s attention, entirely destined to him, when it was usually destined for the customers of the photo shop. The photography and the camera serve as means of expressing the love of the mother for her son.
Does photography become equal to identity? It depends on the purpose it is used for. Susan Sontag, one of the most cited authors for interpretations of photography, considers that: “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”[6] During the photo session, until the mother chooses the perfect pose, the child changes several expressions; all of them part of his Self. These expressions may compose a kaleidoscope defining the entire existence of the Self. As an adult, Andrei Codrescu will recognize that he finds it difficult to be in front of a camera, all photographers reminding him the photo sessions with his mother. He faces the dilemma of choosing the correct expression and posture for every picture, as all the other ones should be denied, chased away from his Self. This time equality is not present between photography and identity. Susan Sontag also brings in discussion photography as evidence. “Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’ve shown photograph of it. […] A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened.”[7] With humour, Andrei Codrescu recounts an event after his immigration to USA. He had not a driving licence, the usual identity proof of the Americans, so, when stopped by a police officer, he proved his identity using a photograph of himself from the cover of his first published book. This time, there is equality between photography and identity, being a strong connection between them for the authorities. As an immigrant on the American land, Codrescu ironically concludes “Photos para la autoridad!”[8]
These were mostly the main characteristics of the essay we observed during our literary analysis, using just the text from the author’s volume, a basic bibliography and the ability of the researcher. Our following analysis will transform the classic researcher into an e-researcher using, as announced, a dedicated software, Tropes.
To use Tropes, an electronic form of the essay is required in order to insert it into the software files during a simple operation. Once the text is introduced in the programme, all we need to do is to choose features of the software to respond to our interest on the text. We maintain the literary analysis centred on the symbol of photography and the terms related to it.
Even from the start, the software states the style of the essay as a rather narrative text, characterized by dynamism and action, also autobiographical, a characteristic that appears from several uses of the personal pronoun “I”. The exactitude of the facts becomes questionable due to the fact that “some notions of doubt have been detected”.[9] The software shows all the contexts in which the notions of doubt appear, the researcher being the one to determine their influence upon the veracity of the facts as autobiographical references.
Two reference fields are shown. Each of them includes an actant group and an acted group of references, which may be selected alone or together. The first reference field shows a general context. The second reference field shows a detailed context. Both fields sort the themes after their frequency. “Photography” is at the top of the list on the first reference field with 55 appearances, and the second as frequency in the detailed reference field, in this case “family” being the first as frequency. This may be a sign for the researcher that the term “photography” may need to be interpreted in a strict correlation with the notion of “family”. A list of various synonyms for photography and other semantically related terms is included into the reference fields. Next to the reference word, appears a list of all the contexts including it.
A graph helps the researcher to visualise the relationships between classes. In the centre of an orbit, the main reference is placed. On the left there are the predecessors of the reference word and on the right there are its successors. The distance between the reference classes depends on the number of connections between them. The graphic shows us that the closest predecessor to photography is family, followed closely by law, then by feeling and house organisations. At a greater distance, other classes follow: Europe, literary work, woman, time, child politics, security, world and electronics. The closest successor is social group, closely followed by feeling, business, and entertainment and far away by way, man, child, time, substance, world, woman, security. Nevertheless, the information is useful for the researcher when a contextual interpretation of photography as symbol in our text is required. Compared with the classical manner of analysis, new relationships are being outlined, even if they are not very frequent in the text, but may prove to be important for its semantic nuances.
Another feature of the software, called “scenario” presents, also in a graph form, the relationships between classes, with a strong line the frequent ones and with a dotted line the infrequent ones. In the category of “photo”, the actant “mother” is frequently related to “father” and “photograph” and infrequently to “shop” and “face”. The infrequent relations between “mother”, on one side and “shop” and “face”, on the other side contradict the emphasis we put on these relations in our old manner analysis. On the other hand, analysing another reference word, “father”, its infrequent relations with “face” and “look” confirm the sense we attributed during the first manner of analysis, which highlighted the absence of the father figure, the inconsistence of the relationship between father and son.
Picture as a way of perceiving the Other is also confirmed and highlighted by the Tropes feature called “relations”. “Picture” appears graphically to be linked most of the time to “world” and “people”.
A star graph displays also relationships between a reference word and other reference words or reference classes. “Photograph” is linked to: mother, apartment, room, world, government, search, baby, contract, son, police and girl, as predecessors. It is also linked to shop, gipsy, object, panic, melancholy, mug, Stalin, materiality, session, apartment, game equipment, end, cost, footwear, street and ground as successors. Once again, not even the most experimented eye of the researcher may comprise all the relationships existing between references. We underline the fact that in our case the analysed text is a short one, an essay, but the software may also analyse larger literary texts such as novels, even making comparisons and connections between several texts from a text corpus.
A distribution graph shows the relationships between the references after splitting the text in equal parts and following the frequency of the relationships after a histogram. Another graph of the reference relationships is constructed on the episodes of the text. The software automatically detects a number of episodes of the narrative line and may analyse different references for each episode or following its distribution in all the episodes. As an example, Tropes detected eleven episodes of the essay, the reference “picture” being presented in a histogram for every episode of the text. Closest to “photography”, different characteristics are found by the software: modality time, modality place, modality negation, the noun “child” and the personal pronoun “I”.
We chose to end here the exemplification for this computer assisted analysis, because our aim is not to present dedicated software, but to deduce some characteristics for this manner of analysing a literary text. First of all, dedicated software instantly produces all the analysis above and many others. All the researcher has to do is to introduce the text into the programme. This way, the researcher may save a lot of precious time. Once again, software is capable of observing hidden or hard-to-notice aspects of the text. But, all the graphs and statistic situations produced by the artificial intelligence need a further interpretation. We cannot put an equality sign between the result of the software and a literary analyse. The researcher is the one who will interpret data and he is the one who will choose which corridor of interpretation is more appropriate or which interpretation grid is suited for each literary text, having as conditions other aspects: the cultural context, the period of the writing, the social context, the programme of a literary movement and so on. We do not underestimate the power of artificial intelligence, but we cannot imagine a proper literary analysis without the intervention of the human mind.
Tropes is just one example of software that may be used for literary analysis and the only one that was at our disposition. Several other software programmes exist on the market, waiting to be used by the researchers. Our paper does not advocate the exclusive use of dedicated software for literary analyses. In our opinion, this type of software may prove very useful to researchers, facilitating their work through a quicker semantic analysis, for example. It can also bring to the researcher’s attention, smaller but significant symbols or fragments of text that may escape the attention of an experienced researcher. But, a software analysis does not replace the work and the finesse of the human mind and human sensibility, characteristics that open various corridors of interpreting literature, not just an exact and statistical interpretation.
That is why, we consider that a virtual analysis of the text may represent only a component of a larger and much complicated process. Talking about the future form of the human being, Andrei Codrescu stated: “… it’s really up to us to decide the future shape of our organism. I like to think of it as three-bodied creature, one electronic, one green, and one plain old flesh-human.”[10] Leaving aside the green component, we think that the researcher of the future may add an electronic component to the already existing old flesh-human one, in a gathering that may constitute an e-researcher. The dawn of this new breed of researcher has already appeared, the future will decide its pertinence.
References
Andrei Codrescu, The Muse Is Always Half-dressed in New Orleans and Other Essays, Picador, USA, New York, 1995.
Andrei Codrescu, Miracol şi catastrofă. Dialoguri cu Robert Lazu, Hartmann, Arad, 2005.
Mircea Eliade, Naşteri mistice, translated by Mihaela Grigore Paraschivescu, Humanitas, Bucureşti, 1995.
Susan Sontag, On Photography, Anchor Books, New York, 1990.
Tropes. Version 7.2. Reference manual, available at
http://www.semantic-knowledge.com/doc/V70/text-analysis/index.html .
Notes