Annotated Bibliography 

By Cassie Nguyen , Dystopian Novel Project

 1. “The Overview Project.” Overviewproject.org. Web. 16 November 2014. 

     The Overview Project is an open-source web based tool that automatically sorts and clusters large numbers of stories or documents into topics and sub-topics. Overview is intended to help users make sense of massive, disorganized collections of text documents. The program applies natural language processing algorithms to automatically sort documents based on similar topics after processing the entirety of the documents, and not just entities or key words. Overview includes a text search engine and tagging system designed to help the user navigate and organize an array of documents through the visualization and mapping of topics and tags. This tagging system is not guaranteed to have the ability to discern and strip the documents of its most essential meanings. However, it constitutes as a viable tool for use in quantitative research and topic modeling. The tool’s functionality derives from its fast visualization and reading interface, and allows for optimal fast scanning and sorting.

The tool allows one to see broad trends, patterns, and structures across sets of documents through its visualizations. By exporting tags, the tool allows one to create visualizations such as maps and charts therefore allowing for underlying connections and similarities among the texts to arise. Another function of the tool is the importing of tags in order to compare texts to data fields for contrasts amongst documents.

     The Overview tool is designed to help qualitative researchers and analysts observe and discover patterns amongst large collections of documents and eliminate the time it would take to go survey an otherwise unorganized collection. This processing and importing of documents allows for a swifter, more organized approach of topic modeling and scanning texts. One should take note that the tool only processes narrative texts and excludes primarily numeric and structured data such as tables, spreadsheets, data dumps, and similar numerical-based documents. 

2. Blei, David M and Chaney, Allison J.B. “Visualizing Topic Models.” Princeton-Computer Science. Web. 16 November 2014. 

     Blei and Chaney’s article presents a tested method for the visualization and implementation of topic modeling in an informative, scholarly approach. The article discusses the topic of probabilistic topic modeling as a “high level statistical tool” and provides visualizations of the authors' Wikipedia web interface as an effective utilization of topic modeling. The researchers offer the solution of topic modeling to the problem of organizing a large collection of data with the intent of extracting its underlying themes. Blei and Chaney presents their ideas and methods in a way that is understandable and accessible to a spectrum of users, and not just machine learning experts, therefore removing the high level statistical theory surrounding it. Instead, they portray their goals in describing the design of the visualization by decomposing the main contentions of the method, that is: summarizing the corpus for the user, revealing the relationships between the content and summaries, and revealing the relationships across content.

     Blei and Chaney supply a running example of the observed data gathered from 100,000 Wikipedia articles modeled under their method of topic modeling. Screen shots and flow maps effectively reveal the organizational methods used by visually enacting how one would navigate a Wikipedia page organized by method of presenting the “high level structure of a corpus with its low level content”. This structure will allow for the organization and extracting of main subjects from importing multiple types of the same or different texts to understand its contents in new, meaningful ways and patterns. Topic modeling allows one to peruse and explore documents’ contents more easily to find the salient themes and relationships needed to assess a large amount of text in a distant reading approach. Blei and Chaney effectively provide a solid example of topic modeling in practice and provide a comprehensive overview towards the ideal use of topic modeling in a digital humanistic approach. 

3. Chung, Terri. “Dystopian Literature Primer.” North Seattle Community College. n.p., n.d. Web. 17 November 2014

This webpage, with information provided by English instructor Terri Chung, was created as a primer on dystopias in contemporary literature as a pretext to her class's discussion of a dystopian society following the reading of The Hunger Games. Chung includes a short primer from the Contemporary Literary Criticism touching upon the definition of a dystopia vs. utopia,  common themes found in dystopian literature, and makes note of the historical circumstances of the time of its rise that could have been said to be conducive to its flourishing. The rest of the page provides an overview of the dystopian fiction genre through a bullet point format summarizing key features. The subject is divided into three categories of the "Characteristics of a Dystopian Society", "Types of Dystopian Control", and "the Dystopian Protagonist." Although the webpage does not go in depth into any of the components of the genre, this template provides a first-stop basis for observing the foundational components and commonalities that make up the genre. This page can serve as a useful guide and resource for identifying and classifying the dystopian novel as it effectively and simplistically lays out the bare, important information necessary for categorizing the prototypical dystopian genre.  

4. Ames, Melissa. “Engaging ‘Apolitical’ Adolescents: Analyzing the Popularity and Educational Potential of a Dystopian Literature Post 9/11.” The High School Journal. Volume 97, Number 1. (2013): pp 3-20. Print.

     Ames’s research essay seeks to identify the rising literary trend of the dystopian genre post 9-11 and re-evaluation of the millennial generation’s stigma as “apolitical” in accordance to its reading preferences (2). She assesses the educational potential of dystopian literature as a possible catalyst for civic engagement amongst the genre’s audience of readers, yet has no definitive claim to connect the potential of the genre to actual engagement amongst its apolitical readers. Ames explores each causal reasoning behind her research subject and addresses this by breaking the subject into subtopics and includes coverage from other plausible references and statistics. Ames gives comprehensive theories seeking to explain the present apathetic lack of civic engagement of the YA (young adult) audience and analyzes the “civic illiteracy epidemic”, the distrustfulness and disconnect towards political sources, and the lack of a “palpable national crisis” (5). The article argues that the post - 9/11 climate contributed to the popularity of these young adult dystopias as this national tragedy sparked an increase in what once was a lack of civil responsibility amongst the observed party.

                  By observing the statistics behind voter turnouts, Ames credits the uprising of civic involvement amongst young adults to 9/11 and the technological platforms such as social networking sites evincing an online political community that fostered such results. Ames also asserts and makes the case that the “socio-political climate” emerging post-9/11 has directly contributed to the mass consumption and popularity of the dystopian genre (16). Through an analysis of Hunger Games, Ames posits the question as to whether such a hit is a “decade- specific phenomenon” possibly linked decade-specific historical context of 9/11 or whether such popularity is independent of the historical context. Ames also opens up the discussion to probe other theories of such a popularity as stemming from something other than the current sociopolitical climate (14).

                  Ames asserts that the 9/11 crisis sparked voter results and that this historical event ignited the rise in dystopian literature, however she realizes the inability to draw a connection from the popularity of the dystopian novel to any similar level of increased civil engagement and awareness that one would expect to observe from a literature focusing on the state of society. The essay comes to the unresolved question as to why there is a mismatch between the reading interests of young adults and yet their lack of political action and engagement and as to whether the consumption of these texts will foreshadow any sort of political transformation. 

5.  Dystopian Books Again Seize Power. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

     This webpage consists of visual diagrams allowing one to see multiple types of charts and graphs mapping the popularity of the “new wave of books” categorized as dystopian literature. GoodReads.com, one of the largest sites for readers and book recommendations, in light of the movie release of The Hunger Games constructed vibrant, visual charts in order to examine the evolution of the dystopian genre. GoodReads, a social cataloging website under Amazon, purposefully displays popular books within its info graphs, therefore one must be aware of the lack of representation of dystopian novels holistically due to the exclusion of other dystopian texts not exclusively displayed. These charts provide a well-organized, graphical basis for modeling findings done through tools reminiscent of those used in distant reading.

     One line chart models the percentage of dystopian books out of all books within some unstated corpus within the time frame of 1920 to 2010. The graph shows us where the spikes in dystopian literature appear on a historical scale accompanied with labels of where major historical wars have occurred. The second visual provides a topic modeling guide to distinguish the dystopian characteristics embodied by each popular chosen work with the elements of: lack of freedom, biological issues, oppressive government, which gender likes it more, post apocalypse, and romance. These works are organized under subcategories of decades with information surrounding the socio-historical issues that characterized that time period along with list of the ideological issues that cultivated the dystopian work, its dystopic traits, and the gender split. Lastly, a bar chart with popular dystopian novels are mapped on a scale of its ratings on GoodReads with Orwell’s 1984 with the highest rating, and Collin’s The Hunger Games trailing not so far behind. These three types of visually representational graphs amass and plot data in an illustrative manner to allow readers to draw insights and make sense of the factual data behind the popularity of the dystopian novel that could not have been done without shifting the gaze of examination to the collection as a whole. By plotting and recording data in this manner, the graphs create meaningful patterns and conclusions for the audience at a quick look and is useful for a site such as GoodReads to probe and invoke interest in the viewer.