Posts with tag Gender

Now back to some texts for a bit. Last spring, I posted a few times about the possibilities for reading genders in large collections of books. I didn’t follow up because I have some concerns about just what to do with this sort of pronoun data. But after talking about it to Ryan Cordell’s class at Northeastern last week, I wanted to think a little bit more about the representation of male and female subjects in late-19th century texts. Further spurs were Matt Jockers recently posted the pronoun usage in his corpus of novels; Jeana Jorgensen pointed to recent research by Kathleen Ragan that suggests that editorial and teller effects have a massive effect on the gender of protagonists in folk tales. Bookworm gives a great platform for looking at this sort of question.

It’s pretty obvious that one of the many problems in studying history by relying on the print record is that writers of books are disproportionately male.

We just rolled out a new version of Bookworm (now going under the name “Bookworm Open Library”) that works on the same codebase as the ArXiv Bookworm released last month. The most noticeable changes are a cleaner and more flexible UI (mostly put together for the ArXiv by Neva Cherniavksy and Martin Camacho, and revamped by Neva to work on the OL version), couple with some behind-the-scenes tweaks that should make it easy to add new Bookworms on other sets of texts in the future. But as a little bonus, there’s an additional metadata category in the Open Library Bookworm we’re calling “author gender.”

A quick follow-up on this issue of author gender.

I just saw that various Digital Humanists on Twitter were talking about representativeness, exclusion of women from digital archives, and other Big Questions. I can only echo my general agreement about most of the comments.