For this blog post I originally wanted to find a network showing the relationships of Beat Artists to one another, using the edge “has shared a romantic partner”. Although I had no such luck in this endeavor, I came across Stephanie Posavec’s “Writing Without Words” project, which uses different types of data visualization to “visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor.”(https://netmap.wordpress.com/tag/jack-kerouac).
The space is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Part 1. The first branch of the network is chapters, which are broken up into paragraphs, sentences, and words. These are directed edges (sentences can be broken up into words, but words cannot be broken up into sentences). The words are color coded to indicate the theme they correspond to, some of the themes being Social Events & Interaction, Travel, Work & Survival, and Character Sketches.
I interpret this visualization as, broadly, a representation of the themes in Part One of On The Road. It has been broken up further, but it would make the same amount of sense if there was one point in the middle representing this space, with colored lines coming off it representing themes, weighted to show how common each theme is. However, such a network would fail to show the spirit of Kerouac’s work. With the structure Posavec has used, we can also see Kerouac’s writing style and get a sense of the book itself: average paragraph length, chapter length, and sentence structure. Even so, this is a very simple unimodal network.
I was debating weather this project could even be considered a network, as it almost seems too straight forward. But thinking through Weingart’s “Demystifying Networks”, it seems to be applicable. First, the variables are interdependent rather than independent. Second, the relationships can be described with the term of “x is the theme of this paragraph”. The edges are inferred, because other readers could break the themes up in a different ways than Posavec. Not all the nodes are connected, as in not all the words/ sentences relate to the same theme, which makes the network effective.
Prosavec’s network of On the Road Part One is a good example of a digital humanities use for networks because it maps a literary work itself and seeks to capture the spirit of the book without using words.