Reflecting on our Final DH Project
Oh, this semester is almost over! It was one heck of a ride. Even though we were struggling with our courses and stressed about the lockdown and COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to manage to work as a team. If you have been following our blogs, you’d know we are students at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon enrolled in the Introduction to Digital Humanities course: ENGL 256B. We have been learning about digital tools all semester in order to combine them in one monumental and meaningful final project. Our Digital Humanities course really gave us an eye-opening adventure to discover tools used in the humanities world through the help of the digital world. It’s really exciting how these two fields work hand in hand to create a fascinating platform for research and development.
Throughout our course, we learned the methods of close and distant reading and how they each contribute to the research implemented. Close reading is the physical act of reading and diving into the book’s world and analyzing based on feeling and close observation of style and interpretations. Distant reading, on the other hand, gathers information that is not always possible for a reader to do so when reading hundreds of pages of different documents or books. Distant reading is where digital humanities come to play an obvious role, for they are responsible for attaining tons of interesting and ground-breaking data that may not have been obvious or even easy to attain.
Throughout our semester, we used Voyant Tools, which is a literary textual analysis platform, and Google MyMaps, which is a digital platform that we used to map literary texts and authors’ lives, to finally present our digital ‘story’ and research findings using the visually interactive slideshow Timeline JS.
We know that in our previous blogs we kind of gave a hint here and there about our final project and now the time has finally come to tell you all about it! Working for this Final DH project combined everything we learned in this course since the very first day. The title of our project is: “Dr. Seuss’s Imaginative and Informative Style of Writing in Children’s Books”.
Who is Dr. Seuss, you might ask? Formerly known as Theodore Seuss Geisel, most well known for his pen name Dr. Seuss. He is one of the most beloved children’s authors who incorporates life lessons with a unique writing style through several techniques such as rhyming and the use of nonsensical words.
We chose Dr.Seuss’s work to be the topic of our project because of the great impact he had on the generations of children and adults alike. While creating stories that shine on concepts like creativity, imagination, activism, acceptance, independence, perseverance and possibility through playful humor for children, Dr. Seuss also left behind serious moral and political messages, especially after World War II, for adults such as democracy, prejudice, imagination, ecology, war, and peace to appreciate indirectly.
The main goal of our project was to investigate how Dr. Seuss’s work managed to impact both children and adults morally and educationally. We explored his unique style of writing and his use of imaginary lexical inventions and other techniques to form a conclusion on the impact that his stories create for all ages. Our findings were conducted through the help of the digital humanity tools!
We chose to focus our research on four of his famous books: The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Oh the Places You’ll Go and The Lorax.
We were interested in his choice of rhetorical strategies and how he was able to persuade readers and deliver indirect moral and political messages. The main purpose of our project was to make use of our Digital Humanity tools in order to answer our Research questions. With textual analysis, we identified the most common words used in the books, their difficulty, and techniques. First, we read the four books and analyzed them closely. Then, we used Voyant to analyze them distantly. Thus, we searched for the most recurrent words and analyzed our books accordingly. Moreover, we used Google My Map where we mapped the author’s life, book publications, and his book tours.
From the beginning of our DH course and the formation of the groups, we were interested in children’s literature. We researched many topics, but in the end, we chose Dr.Seuss as we all grew up reading his stories and have many memories with them, so this particular topic caught our attention. We conducted several types of research regarding his life, work, education, achievements, books, and analytical studies about his works. What piqued our interest the most was his style of writing and how he was able to greatly influence children. As a result, we shaped our research questions accordingly. Since we set a groundwork with the extensive research we did regarding Dr. Seuss, this allowed us throughout our project to remain convinced and confident with what we were exploring. Moreover, upon utilizing different tools, we got promising results that helped us stay on the same track we had first intended for our project and did not find the need to change its direction.
Now, let’s walk you through our DH Project journey starting with Google MyMaps. We can all agree, (and we hope you would as well!) that it’s probably one of the nicest tools to use, whether it was for professional or personal reasons. Being able to personalize a real map for your own purpose was so exciting. It’s really a great platform with the perfect visuals. For our project, we originally thought that we may find it difficult to map anything, but with just enough research, we were impressed with the results we found. Sadly, we were unable to map his literary texts because no countries or cities were ever mentioned, and all his stories were imaginative scenarios, so we had to get creative with our findings, and hope that we could find some sort of pattern or revelation that would strengthen our research interests. After some intensive research and online close reading, we eventually mapped a time sequence of Dr. Seuss’s entire life. We created 6 layers on our map, one for each of our 6 research topics, and created icons of different colors and shapes to distinguish each of the layers when they are all visible. First, we mapped out a time sequence of Dr. Seuss’s achievements and studies throughout his life and career. This helped us better understand how his life experiences developed his achievements and led him to create the stories and cartoons that are so loved by the world. Second, we mapped out the main locations he lived throughout his life which allowed us to understand the regions that were first exposed to his work at the time of their publications and how he became famous. Third, we mapped out the locations of book publications and movie productions which gave us an idea of the areas that were first exposed to Dr. Seuss’s line of work and to what extent his work was accepted. It also allowed us to identify the level of popularity of his books and cartoons and the level of demand for his work being used in modern methods of production. Then, we mapped out the location of countries that translated his books which helped us learn about the impact he had on the rest of the world. Finally, we mapped the locations of his posthumous honors and monuments. Mapping out such information truly helped us understand Dr. Seuss’s professional career, how his life experiences developed his skills, how his locations may have impacted his national and worldwide achievements, and also allow us to identify his level of popularity and the demand for his work in modern methods of production. Although it was a lot of work, the ability to share the map with each other to work simultaneously got the job done. Teamwork gets the dream work!
Another one of our tools used during our DH Project journey was Google Books Ngram Viewer, which is a search engine that plots a user-defined set of ‘strings’ or words on a frequency versus time graph, showing the trend of words found throughout the years in publications, online websites and platforms, and even some of the historical digitized works. However, this tool has not been updated since 2008, so results after 2008 are not beneficial. For our project, we tried searching for the names of our book titles but yielded no results. In fact, it was difficult for us to collect important information for our research questions. However, we did search for Dr. Seuss, to get a clearer idea of when he became most popular (which by the way was around 2003-2004), and why he was a trendy figure even during our childhood and teenage years as well, and much after his death. We concluded that his books greatly impacted millennials and this explains why he became extremely famous around that time.
Moreover, the bulk of our analysis for our project was based on utilizing Voyant tools. Voyant tools allowed us to dig deeper into our four chosen texts. We first started with analyzing the Beginner books : The Cat and The Hat and Green Eggs and Ham in order to investigate how such words could have an influence on children in writing and speaking. Regarding the difficulty of the texts, the vocabulary density was very low. This showed that there was a substantial amount of repetition of the words in the books and that it had a very simple language that is logical and easily understood for emerging English readers. Most of the words in the Beginner books are monosyllabic and had a lot of rhyming to it. This made sense since these books were designed to teach reading and not overwhelm a child with too many different words. This is also ideal because the child encounters the same word many times. The first time you see the word — you have to sound it out, and Seuss’s end rhymes give you clues to pronunciation. Subsequent times, seeing the word offers a sense of mastery for the child.
As for the Message Books analysis, Voyant allowed us to notice the very small and genius techniques and details in Dr. Seuss’s works. Starting with Oh, the Places You’ll Go, it was so exciting to notice his insistence of using words starting with all the letters of the alphabet (except z) in his rhyming poem, which significantly increased the vocabulary density of the words used compared to his Beginner Books. Additionally, his poem was filled with acronym pairs from the start all the way till the end, as he subtly explains the journey of life for adults to understand, and for children to appreciate while looking at colorful and fun illustrations. In fact, Oh, the Places You’ll Go was the last book that he wrote, and was based on his life experiences. That was a really nice fact to know when combined with the information gathered from Voyant Tools. Also, The Lorax was an extremely illustrative story filled with messages in both his texts and cartoons about the importance of saving the environment, both of which adults and children would appreciate alike. We realized the different trends spreading across his works; although both of these books were meant to educate and send a message, each had a special way of conveying the message through his broad techniques.
The distant reading analyses could not have been made clearer without the use of some close reading. His techniques were not purely literary; he included many visual designs and illustrations that would psychologically ensure that the moral and informative messages are clear to the reader. Close reading is an important aspect to formulate concise findings and results for our research. Up till now, distant reading and digital analysis are still unable to independently function without human intervention.
Using Timeline JS as our primary digital platform for our final project helped us wrap up our research findings in a visually appealing way. It allowed us to convey our story where the readers can interact with the material and at the same to present a playful and colorful ambience through snippets of Dr. Seuss’s illustrations, cartoons, and works of his important milestones to ultimately reach a holistic view of him. Each slide was matched with unique visuals that go hand in hand with the text and this further highlighted the importance of his impactful techniques through art. We were very impressed to find that Dr. Seuss’s artwork had an equal significance to his literary texts, and this would not have been evident to us if it weren’t for Timeline’s advantageous features that allow viewers to engage in more than just text. This further confirms our research findings that Dr. Seuss’s technique to influence children doesn’t stem purely from his educational degree, but also from his artistic integrity. This was also backed up by our mapping analysis of his life on Google My Map, when he decided to drop out of his postgraduate college to chase his dreams of drawing cartoons. It was a fruitful experience using Timeline JS.
During this semester, every assignment and lecture we had to do and attend for the Digital Humanities course contributed in helping us build and finalize our final project. After thorough research and work on the different tools we were introduced to, as well as their application on the work of the author we have chosen, we can proudly say that our team achieved the main goals we articulated in our first project proposal and we are satisfied with our results because they reflected our objectives.
Since the beginning of the course, we were encouraged to document and share our DH experiences on platforms such as Twitter and WordPress via tweets and blogs respectively. With every new experience comes mixed feelings and an opportunity for reflection. At first, WordPress was a bit challenging because it was a new platform for all of us. However, with the guidance of Dr. Najla Jarkas we were able to build our individual blogs. The more regular blogging we did, the more we got the hang of it! Organizing our blogs in such a way helped us to arrange the ideas for our DH project. We feel that WordPress was the perfect platform to unite everything we learned and implemented throughout the semester. While this may be the last blog we write related to our Digital Humanities course, it certainly won’t be the last one we ever write on our WordPress Blog. We definitely intend on using this blog to publish regular posts on several topics that might interest us! Also, our encounter with Twitter was a unique one, as many of us didn’t use this platform before this course. After making accounts and learning the ins-and-outs of Twitter, we followed many digital humanities pages worldwide which allowed us to understand the impact of Digital Humanities on our lives. Along the ride, we really enjoyed tweeting the progress of our project every week and filling our homepages with DH news and gifs to convey our excitement.
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller
This quote sums up how we feel about working in a group, especially in this course that demanded almost all our work be done in groups. When the semester started, we were always in each other’s company in the beloved Fisk Lab, where we could work together and communicate openly and the ideas would flow. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of university, we weren’t able to meet up to work. This put a slight strain on our work in the beginning, trying to set up group calls and organize a set time to work all together was a bit hard with all the chaos happening. At the same time, being in a group helped as we were all pushing each other to work and get our work done in the best way possible even with all the obstacles we faced. With the semester coming to an end we can proudly say that with dedication and good team spirit we were able to push ourselves to new heights and reach the goals and outcomes of our project.
ENGL256B has been unlike any other course we have taken in AUB. As our journey comes to an end, our knowledge about the digital humanities has expanded. Mediating two worlds stemming from two completely different aspects and cultivating humanity into what is seemingly so robotic. This course granted us the opportunity to learn about new tools and directly apply them in the Fisk Lab (Our class destination) on our desktops and laptops. We constantly worked in teams which helped individually expand our scope of thinking. We’re so sad to say this is the end, this is goodbye. It was an absolute joy taking ENGL256B, it brought out the mini blogger in us, and we recommend it to any student looking to expand their knowledge on unique tools and the digital world mixed with humanities!
Finally, we would like to thank Dr. Najla for her continuous effort and support during this whole semester. Without her dedication we wouldn’t have learned about the beneficial tools in this course 🙂 Check out our final TimelineJS project here.
Written by: Dalia Bekdache, Mirriam Hijazi, Raghad Sheronick, and Sara Deeb
Ad Astra with Dalia Bekdache 