Cassandra Nguyen

English 149

Professor Liu

15 Dec 2014

 

Tracking the Dystopian Genre through Use of Digital Humanities Methodologies

 

          In the fall of 2014, a group of undergraduates at the University of California, Santa

Barbara under the instruction and supervision of professor Alan Liu formed the Dystopian Novel

Project research team to investigate the recent rise and reemergence of the dystopian genre,

unforeseen in fifty years. The project was undertaken to gain insight and understanding towards

the factors contributing to the surge in popularity and success of the genre and if any, the new

tropes and conventions that shape this literary category. The large-scale project itself was carried

out in a deconstructed approach that was a result of four smaller scale studies, with each member

focusing on an aspect of digital humanities methodologies. This essay will focus upon the

research approach each member explored as related to the digital humanities tools of textual

analysis, topic modeling, digital timeline mapping, and data visualization. The project conclusion

is a culmination of the analyses of the four approaches taken together as a whole to draw

meaningful inferences towards the evolution of the literary genre and its appeal towards its

audience.

          The study of dystopian discourse posits as a purposeful topic of study because this

speculative fiction has the potential to reveal the concerns of its society through its role as a

satirist, escapist medium. The project sought to analyze the evolution of the discourse and its rise

and fall in popularity over a span of time in order to compare its past literary successes to that of

the one presently. The hypothesis was that the socio-cultural and socio-historical context in

which these novels are produced impacts and shapes the genre. The investigation of the genre

produced a series of auxiliary questions that could hopefully be addressed by this research

project. What does this genre reveal about our attitudes towards the future and government?

What is the appeal of such a genre? Is there a correlation between current events and the surge of

popularity experienced recently by this genre?

          Firstly, the project defined a corpus of books of which served as a sampling to represent

the genre holistically. Using the Goodreads’ infographic “Dystopian Books Again Seize Power”

as a basis, the team identified the thirteen texts used in the infographic as a good representation

of well-known, influential novels spanning from the early twentieth century to the twenty-first

century. Secondly, these novels were divided into three distinct waves from the defined corpus,

and each would represent and comprise of texts from the three distinct eras defined as “1930’s-

1960’s”, “Second Wave”, and “Young Adult.”

          The team worked with these three categorized waves as a basis for understanding the

change in the discourse by dividing the corpus of selected books into three samplings of four to

five books that were affected by a common socio-cultural aspect. The thirteen books included in

the corpus are Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury,

and 1984 by George Orwell in the 1930’s-1960’s corpus; Never Let Me Go by Kazuo

Ishiguro, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and Children of Men by P.D. James in the

Second Wave corpus; and Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins,

and Crossed by Ally Condie in the Young Adult corpus.

          A timeline by Brittany Choi was constructed via the web-based browser, Tiki Toki, to

map the patterns of publications of dystopian novels against a historical background. The

timeline is a tool that allows for a broad, visually representative overview of the genre over time,

condensing publication dates of novels, their main themes, and major historical events within an

interactive interface. The researcher chose forty novels from a list of titles categorized as

dystopian literature as a representative of the genre as a whole. The web app entitled “Tiki-Toki”

was chosen as because it allows one to create interactive multimedia timelines with features such

as being able to embed images, texts, and videos and add multiple, connecting layers or tiers to

one’s timeline. The first tier was embedded with major historical events and political conflicts

that could arguably attribute to the rise dystopian novels. The second tier was embedded with the

novels plotted according to its year of publication, along with short blurbs containing its main

themes. Multiple tiers of the timeline connected to each other add dimension and categorization,

while historicizing major historical event in relation to the publications of dystopian novels

provides context and visualizations of publication patterns. Through this visual mapping, it can

be inferred that historical events invoking concern for social and political issues are a trigger for

spikes in the publication of dystopian literature before and after such events. This suggests that

authors compose dystopian fiction with the intent to criticize contemporary issues affecting

society, not just after, but also before such events occur. There is a significant rise in the

publication of dystopian literature in the latter half of the 20th century going into the 21st century,

seen by accumulation of book titles being plotted in the latter half of this time line. This can be

explained by the events during this period, such as and not limited to World War II, the Cold

War, and the War on Terror, which prompted societal fears towards a controlling government

and loss of freedom, and propelled the rise in dystopian publications as a result. By the method

of creating a timeline, viewers are provided a convenient visualization to link novels to its

historical relevance and inspiration. This allowed the team to witness the influential climate and

authorial intent in which these novels were created. The timeline worked to document how the

rise of dystopian literature reacts to and reflects upon the political and social turmoil.

          Maxine Ansaldo worked with the Voyeur tools, a web-based text analysis environment,

to perform lexical analysis upon the corpora of text in order to study the frequency and

distribution data. Links and Cirrus were the Voyant tools used. Links finds collates for words

and displays links between them. It shows term frequencies in proximity to a keyword and puts

this into visualization, showing a web of terms. Key excerpts were chosen from each novel and

imported, then Links created a web of words these books had in common, each book color-coded

with its own color. The most common words were “she” and “the”, which were unhelpful.

However, key words describing dystopian themes and concepts chosen by the researcher were

then entered into Link’s search bar. These search words produced linked to other themes within

the corpora of books, including the words: government, woman/women, man/men, fascism,

future, past, war, freedom, choice, biological, issues, environment, terrors, and love. By using

Links, it is observed that there are commonalities between all the books regardless of the way

they were separated by waves, as all books ended up becoming linked in one way or another.

Cirrus is a visualization tool displaying a word cloud relating to the frequency of words

appearing within documents, with the larger the word, the more frequent the term. After

inputting the same excerpts as were used for Links, words with the highest frequencies besides

“the” that coincided with all the novels were: “always”, “never”, “old”, “new”, and “now.” All

these words seem to have some loose connection to the theme of future and time. These results

paired with the use of the Google books Ngram Viewer tool reveals a connection between the

concept of future into the early 21st century and authors’ concerns towards a proximate future.

The phrase “future=>*_ADJ” was inputted into the Google Ngram search bar between the years

1800 to 2008 from the English Fiction corpus. This input displayed the top ten adjectives to

future and displayed a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books

defined as English fiction. The adjectives “near”, “own”, “immediate”, “distant”, “bright”,

“whole”, “great”, “uncertain”, “brilliant”, and “happy” were produced. There is an observed

increase in the use of “near” future appearing in the corpus, with “own” and “immediate” future

trailing in as the next most appeared adjectives to occur in front of future. The adjectives “great”,

“brilliant”, and “happy” future as of 2008 showed the least appearance in the corpora. This

shows that authors have an increasing consciousness and concern towards writing about a future

that is near or immediate. There are less descriptive adjectives being used to describe a positive

future.

          By entering in excerpts from individual books into Cirrus, common themes of each can

be compared across novels spanning from different waves. In 1984, the most common words

were Winston, party, big, brother, comrade, time, past, ministry, and Oceania. In Brave New

World, the words included god, savage, world, old, now, men, reason, new, and man.

In Fahrenheit 451, the most frequent words are people, want, give, burn, school, now, and

new. The Handmaid’s Tale included words such as, she, women, red, time, street, and freedom.

The words for V for Vendetta included freedom, anarchy, justice, vendetta, remember, never, and

love. Common themes in The Hunger Games include reaping, district, woods, always, capitol,

and mother. In Uglies, the most frequent words were she, peril, pretty, new, darkness, bridge,

town, never, night, few, face, always, rope, right, pulled, herself, machine, water, street, and

pretties. Finally, the most frequent words in Divergent include today, eyes, agnegation, dog,

faction, dauntless, room, myself, candor, school, and new. The young adult novels in

comparison to its dystopian predecessors of the twentieth century have less frequent words

pertaining to a society, and instead have frequency words that are not universally used, yet are

made up for the fictional purpose of the story. This reveals a transformation in the language of

dystopian novels from its origins to its young adult variants towards a more fictional vocabulary

relating to its dystopian elements of romance, fantasy, and science fiction. Since the Voyeur

tools are currently a work in progress, some planned features not yet implemented could have

eliminated some of the weaknesses affecting our textual analyses could and have improved the

functionality of our searches. There was a lack of more advanced linguistic processing such as

lemmatization, identification of parts of speech, and semantic awareness.

          Tristan Denton experimented with topic modeling as a means for text data mining and

analyzing the corpus of texts discursively. Topic model algorithms discover a hidden thematic

structure in a collection of documents and find salient themes and represent each document as a

combination of themes. The discovered structure induces relationships, which lead to

interactions in the visualization. MALLET, a Java-based package for machine learning

applications, was used to find a list of 60 topics that pertained to the corpus of books from the

three waves, therefore twenty topics each were generated for each wave. From each list, topics

were removed from analysis based on incoherence, over-specificity, or disconnectedness. The

list of topic words was then imported into Gephi via CSV files and made into graphs. Gephi is an

interactive visualization and exploration platform for understanding networks of topics. The

graphs created in Gephi were set so that each node was a topic number or word with at least one

connection to another topic. Larger nodes have more connection. The graphs show the points of

intersection between discourses in each of its respective waves. In interpreting the Gephi graphs,

the first wave of books seemed to have an overall theme pertaining to an array of topics geared

the body, expression, nature, society, and time. The second wave of books included the topics

found in the first wave, and included themes addressing domesticity, gender, and relationships.

The third graph representing the third wave focused on topics including a concern for family and

fears of oppression, authority. Finally, a graph was created using the topic words from all eras to

create a graph that displays the points of intersection between the discourse networks of the

entire corpus of dystopian texts, making commonalities between all three eras visible.

Although MALLET can help navigate large bodies of information such as entire books,

understanding the topics extracted and applying the results became confusing. MALLET finds

clusters of words that appear together, thus forming “topics”, however this leads to a variety of

outputs that are difficult to make sense of. The GUI interface also alienates novice users who are

not accustomed to a command line, thus affecting easy usability.

          Cassie Nguyen utilized the concept of data visualization and information design to create

an infographic, modeling upon Goodreads’ dystopian infographic. A key was provided which

included symbols representing dystopian traits that were to be implemented in a tagging system

in order for viewers to attribute these elements to a book for easy reference and detect

commonalities across the texts. Then, the same corpora of books were divided into the same

three distinct waves “1930’s-1960’s”, “Second Wave”, and “Young Adult Explosion.” There

was a pattern of dystopian commonalities shared between books under each wave that helped

categorize and reveal the societal concerns that shaped books from a similar time period. The

first wave was categorized under the tag line “Fear of State.” The four books falling under this

category all shared the themes of “oppressive government” and “lack of freedom and choices.”

The commonality of these symbols was due to the influences of WWII, and the political

ideologies of socialism, fascism, and communism, which concerned the world’s societies at the

time being. The second wave of books, categorized under “Anxiety of the Body” shared the

dystopian elements of “lack of freedom and choices” and “biological/reproductive issues”. This

was concluded to be a reaction towards the environmental crises, the Cold war, and the identity

politics in effect at the time, which led to fears of a controlling government and loss of freedom,

and control towards matters of the body. The third wave entitled the “Young Adult Explosion”

shared the elements of a “romance or love triangle” and “loss of freedom and control.” The

shared element of a romantic subplot within each of the young adult books as well as fear of loss

of freedom was attributed to need to appeal to a teenage audience, which would identify with

these themes. The third wave of books was seen as a reaction to the debate on the validity of pop

culture, the September 11 attacks, and the War on Terror.

          In addition, the creator mapped additional elements such as hope, books made into

movies, an author to protagonist gender comparison and whether the book was made into a

trilogy. Hope was mapped for each book signifying whether the ending was one that

demonstrated some semblance of a hopeful, salvable future for the characters or hopeless.

Because the books were ordered in ascending order of year, the latter young adult books all share

a hopeful ending, while the books prior to this literary wave are scattered amongst their level of

hopefulness for its ending. An author to protagonist gender was also mapped out in order to

compare the gender of the author to the protagonist to see if it would reveal anything. Earlier

novels shared the commonality of a male-to-male author to protagonist gender comparison

while, the second wave experienced a fluctuation of male-to-female, male-to-male, and femaleto-

female, while in the third wave nearly all the novels were written by a female author to a

female protagonist. Another element of the key was a symbol representing “trilogies” which

mapped which novels were produced as a set of novels, or a trilogy. Interestingly, only and all

the novels from the young adult wave were made into trilogies. Books made into a recent movie

were given a movie symbol, and almost all the books in the corpus except three were made into

movies, thus revealing that Hollywood filmmakers are seeking to turn these popular titles into

box office adaptations. By mapping out commonalities in the form of an infographic, the team

was able to detect certain changes within the framework and thematic content of these novels

over time. The young adult novels were significantly different from its predecessors. They

featured romantic subplots, stories written in the form of trilogies, and tough heroines written by

mostly female writers, all traits that were nonexistent before the 21st century explosion of young

adult dystopian literature. The infographic itself proved a functional tool in utilizing graphics to

enhance the researcher’s ability to detect patterns and trends that could not be seen through close

reading. Mapping the commonalities between novels proved to be an effective way to draw

insightful conclusions, and the use of a tagging system provided viewers with an easy

visualization and reading interface that allowed for fast scanning for commonalities.

The methods utilized by the researchers serve as a tangible example of the capability of

digital humanities tools and distant reading methods as a way to study literature in an advanced,

digital age. Due to the constraints of time and resources, the research team was unable to study

the dystopian genre holistically, however by just surveying a sample corpus of texts, there was

an evident change in the narrative function and structure of the dystopian novel across time

which lent possible answers towards its rise in popularity. In essence, the genre itself over time

has been used as a medium to react to and critique contemporary concerns, which matched with

the initial inferences of the project. However, through the use of digital humanities tools, the

dystopian novel project concluded that there is a departure from the genre’s previous function,

and a significant change in the discourse itself to its adaptation from an adult to young adult

audience. The recent novels have been observed to be less didactic than their adult counterparts,

have less urgency in their social criticism, focus on its romantic elements, feature a heroic female

lead and always include a hopeful conclusion. Because the young adult fiction is dominating and

monopolizing the dystopian genre, the novel has manipulated itself, showing a definite

transformation of the novel in its focus, appeal, and audience. Overall, there seems to be less

focus on contemporary issues and more focus on broad concepts and made up worlds with less

parallelism to the real world, and a greater appeal towards sensationalism. This study did not

answer the reason why young adult fiction is making a trend of the dystopian genre per se,

however did highlight the extensive transformation of the genre over the span of a century and

how it strongly responded to its socio-cultural environment and change in its audience.

 

 

Works Cited:

“Dystopian Books Again Seize Power.” Goodreads. Goodreads Inc., 21 March 2012. Web. 11

Dec 2014.

“Gephi Quick Start.” Slideshare. Mar 2010. Web. 13 Dec 2014.

"Hermeneuti.ca – The Rhetoric of Text Analysis." Voyeur Tools: See Through Your Texts. N.p.,

n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2014.