Tuesday, August 26, 2014

The Morpheus Database: Coding Genres of Texts


"I suggest constituting transsexuals 
not as a class or problemic third gender 
but as a genre – a set of embodied texts"

'The Empire Strikes Back'
Sandy Stone

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The Morpheus Database (Mark 2) represents a second stage in the development of an interactive archive of transformation in literature. At this point, I begin Beta Testing the database by allowing online access to the information in order to assess the viability of the program. 

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From Data-Entry to Data-Use

Last month, I discussed problems posed by "thinking like a computer" as I hit the half-way point for data-entry for my summer research. Having input over 100 essays and articles into the Morpheus Database for Critical Theory, I determined that while many of the intra-text coding was working exceedingly well but the inter-text coding was struggling due to a lack of effectively limiting tags. Countering the demand in the Humanities to open up possible meanings and relations for texts, the Digital Humanities often has to impose limits on these connections in order to tell the highly literal-minded computers exactly what sort of datasets we want produced.

Discovering a lack of effective tags at this point was not disappointing but an expected part of the process of building a database. Critical insights can come at any point in the construction, but data-entry and data-use are two periods in which the early architecture of the coding are challenged. Last month, with the data-entry in full swing I began to notice that the intra text elements were developing nicely via the use of text-boxes that allowed me to summarize and quote arguments. The inter-text elements, however, provided for by text boxes and yes/no tags for a range of relevant fields of study (such as Disability Studies and Gender Studies) were too broad to provide useful parameters by which to produce clarifying datasets. A problem was posed that I was still answering.


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Genres of Theory

In the past month I have begun to transition from exclusively doing data-entry to also using the data. As a result, the output that I wanted from the database began to give useful suggestions on how to restructure the input and tagging process. Having read processed and annotated the texts for the first round of data-entry by hand (while still needing to enter their information into the database) I began to surmise that certain questions and connections were developing between the critical theory texts. As the database at present serves (but not exclusively) my research personal project about "Transgender History and Theories of Transformation," I took a suggestion from seminal Trans Theory essay by Sandy Stone "the Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto" and began ordering my lines of though according to "genres" that connect ideas about the body and ideas about texts in a ways that produce interesting patterns of association.

One set of clusters mapped different genres within understandings of the Trans Body (e.g. Transvestites, Transsexuals, Transgender, Intersex) that related to corresponding figures in medieval periods of literature (e.g. Cross-Dressers, Eunuchs, Madness, and Hermaphrodites). Suggestively, the foci on different figures resonated with genres of medieval class-division (e.g. Those Who Fight, Those Who Pray, and Those Who Work) that in turn represented the relevant authors, audience or subjects of medieval literary genres (e.g. Romance, Hagiography, and Tale Compendiums). As the work of the Theory Database is to map how arguments align as well as oppose one another, especially relating to Transgender and Disability, the mode of understanding identity suggests another range of genres (e.g. via the medical model, identity model, critical model and literary model) as well as the mode of controlling/constructing identity (e.g. via surgery, prosthetics, drugs, and diagnosis). These categories prove narrow enough to allow for texts to be distinguished and sorted but broad enough to allow for tense relations between texts to suggest critical differences.


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Trans-Genre Coding

These new tags are not perfect, but words in the Humanities never are even with the drive for flexible understandings and even less so in the Digital Humanities where limitations in the coding can mean precision when speaking to and through computers. It is very likely that these tags will change as I continue through the ongoing processes of design, data-entry and data-use. As is often the case in academia, pragmatism allows for forward motion even as ideals critique the ideologies that are inscribed into the digital construction. This forward motion in the coding translates into useful insights, just as insights from the note-taking translated into forward motion for the coding. 

In particular, in developing and testing out the tagging design I am already finding correspondences between genres. For instance, not surprisingly arguments coded as focusing on Transsexual figures often overlap or relate to texts on Surgery and/or Drugs. What is more surprising is the high volume of relations between Transsexual figures and the medieval genre of Tale Compendiums by/for/involving the medieval "Laboratores," or Those Who Work. While these relations follow certain expectations about the texts selected for initial entry into the database, many do not. Furthermore, as my mapping of arguments has continually reminded me, it is important to first fully establish the position from which you approach a task before you go about exploring alternatives. In this way, the reflective process of coding (design, data-entry, data-use) mirrors the Scholastic methodology for arguments (thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis). This further supports a thought from Steve Jobs that I emphasized last month and continue to believe bears repeating: "learn how to program a computer, learn a computer language, because it teaches you how to think."


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Explore the Theory Database!

Sign up to be an authorized Beta-Tester! Add to the conversation about transformation and critical theory!

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