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Jeff Bellomi - Visualizing and Mapping Exercises

Page history last edited by Jeffrey Bellomi 9 years, 4 months ago

So, here's Foucault in a graph.  I ran his text "Qu'est-ce que les lumières" through ManyEyes and put it into a bar graph.  The huge spikes in the graph come from my lack of knowledge with regards to create a stop list for the website, however in and of themselves they pose an interesting set of issues.  

 

 

 

First, a linguistic angle.  That huge spike on the left is the preposition "de", and the largest spike on the far right of the graph is the article "a" (imagine a downward right-facing accent on that as at the moment I have no idea how to make an accent grave on this PC).  This could be a meaningless tidbit of data relative to Foucault's writing style, or an already recognized truth of the French language, however the extreme disproportion between the two begs the questions as to why that is the case.  Placed against a large corpus of French philosophical texts of the 20th century, perhaps one could find a correlation between writing styles or the evolution of the French language in general.  Ambitious, overreaching, and probably a bit pointless, this bit of "digital linguistics" still caught my eye.

 

But what was particularly interesting to me are the moments wherein concepts directly related to the article as a whole fight against the current and break through the fringe at the bottom.  Granted, the largest spikes all belong to articles. prepositions, conjunctions, etc., however every so often, noticeable spikes (which I have highlighted) pop up containing indicative words to Foucault's thought.  Context specific terms such as "Kant", "Aufklarung", and such are unsurprisingly within this group.  However it is the little highlighted spike furthest to the right, that was at the least a delightful surprise.  "Critique", amongst all of the general terms Foucault uses throughout the work stands tall (so to speak) on its own, and its hard to imagine another word being as tightly connected with his work (Power, of course, notwithstanding).  It would be interesting to visualize a corpus of all of Foucault's written work to actually see which words rise to the top insofar as usage count goes.  Would "pouvoir"/"puissance"/"power" actually reign supreme?  It's hard to say, or if this would even really matter, however visualization at the very least allows for a direct mainline into this type of statistical analysis, that, for all of its difficulties and obstacles, can offer some harmonizing moments with refreshing clarity.  Perhaps this is even the logical extension of his concept of genealogy by way of Nietzsche's thought.  This idea will be developed in my first blog post, however, so I will use this image as a starting point at that time.

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