Tag: genre

Categories
18c 19c 20c collection-building discovery strategies machine learning

How to find English-language fiction, poetry, and drama in HathiTrust.

The relative sizes of different genres, represented as a percentage of pages in the English-language portion of HathiTrust. 854,476 volumes are covered. Nonfiction, front matter, and back matter aren't represented here. Results have been smoothed with a five-year moving average.

Although methods of analysis are more fun to discuss, the most challenging part of distant reading may still be locating the texts in the first place [1].

In principle, millions of books are available in digital libraries. But literary historians need collections organized by genre, and locating the fiction or poetry in a digital library is not as simple as it sounds. Older books don’t necessarily have genre information attached. (In HathiTrust, less than 40% of English-language fiction published before 1923 is tagged “fiction” in the appropriate MARC control field.)

Volume-level information wouldn’t be enough to guide machine reading in any case, because genres are mixed up inside volumes. For instance Hoyt Long, Richard So, and I recently published an article in Slate arguing (among other things) that references to specific amounts of money become steadily more common in fiction from 1825 to 1950.

Frequency of reference to "specific amounts" of money in 7,700 English-language works of fiction. Graphics from Wickham, ggplot2 [2].
Frequency of reference to “specific amounts” of money in 7,700 English-language works of fiction. Graphics here and throughout from Wickham, ggplot2 [2].

But Google’s “English Fiction” collection tells a very different story. The frequencies of many symbols that appear in prices (dollar signs, sixpence) skyrocket in the late nineteenth century, and then drop back by the early twentieth.

Frequencies of "$" and "6d" in Google's "English Fiction" collection, 1800-1950.
Frequencies of “$” and “6d” in Google’s “English Fiction” collection, 1800-1950.

On the other hand, several other words or symbols that tend to appear in advertisements for books follow a suspiciously similar trajectory.

Frequencies of "$", "8vo" (octavo) and "cloth" in Google's "English Fiction" collection, 1800-1950.
Frequencies of “$”, “8vo” (octavo) and “cloth” in Google’s “English Fiction” collection, 1800-1950.

What we see in Google’s “Fiction” collection is something that happens in volumes of fiction, but not exactly in the genre of fiction — the rise and fall of publishers’ catalogs in the backs of books [3]. Individually, these two- or three-page lists of titles for sale may not look like significant noise, but because they often mention prices, and are distributed unevenly across the timeline, they add up to a significant potential pitfall for anyone interested in the role of money in fiction.

I don’t say this to criticize the team behind the Ngram Viewer. Genre wasn’t central to their goals; they provided a rough “fiction” collection merely as a cherry on top of a massively successful public-humanities project. My point is just that genres fail to line up with volume boundaries in ways that can really matter for the questions scholars want to pose. (In fact, fiction may be the genre that comes closest to lining up with volume boundaries: drama and poetry often appear mixed in The Collected Poems and Plays of So-and-So, With a Prose Life of the Author.)

You can solve this problem by selecting works manually, or by borrowing proprietary collections from a vendor. Those are both good, practical solutions, especially up to (say) 1900. But because they rely on received bibliographies, they may not entirely fulfill the promises we’ve been making about dredging the depths of “the great unread,” boldly going where no one has gone before, etc [4]. Over the past two years, with support from the ACLS and NEH, I’ve been trying to develop another alternative — a way of starting with a whole library, and dividing it by genre at the page level, using machine learning.

In researching the Slate article, we relied on that automatic mapping of genre to select pages of fiction from HathiTrust. It helped us avoid conflating advertisements with fiction, and I hope other scholars will also find that it reduces the labor involved in creating large, genre-specific collections. The point of this blog post is to announce the release of a first version of the map we used (covering 854,476 English-language books in HathiTrust 1700-1922).

The whole dataset is available on Figshare, where it has a DOI and is citable as a publication. An interim report is also available; it addresses theoretical questions about genre, as well as questions about methods and data format. And the code we used for the project is available on Github.

For in-depth answers to questions, please consult the interim project report. It’s 47 pages long; it actually explains the project; this blog post doesn’t. But here are a few quick FAQs just so you can decide whether to read further.

“What categories did you try to separate?”

We identify pages as paratext (front matter, back matter, ads), prose nonfiction, poetry (narrative and lyric are grouped together), drama (including verse drama), or prose fiction. The report discusses the rationale for these choices, but other choices would be possible.

“How accurate is this map?”

Since genres are social institutions, questions about accuracy are relative to human dissensus. Our pairs of human readers agreed about the five categories just mentioned for 94.5% of the pages they tagged [5]. Relying on two-out-of-three voting (among other things), we boiled those varying opinions down to a human consensus, and our model agreed with the consensus 93.6% of the time. So this map is nearly as accurate as we might expect crowdsourcing to be. But it covers 276 million pages. For full details, see the confusion matrices in the report. Also, note that we provide ways of adjusting the tradeoff between recall and precision to fit a researcher’s top priority — which could be catching everything that might belong in a genre, or filtering out everything that doesn’t belong. We provide filtered collections of drama, fiction, and poetry for scholars who want to work with datasets that are 97-98% precise.

“You just wrote a blog post admitting that even simple generic boundaries like fiction/nonfiction are blurry and contested. So how can we pretend to stabilize a single map of genre?”

The short answer: we can’t. I don’t expect the genre predictions in this dataset to be more than one resource among many. We’ve also designed this dataset to have a certain amount of flexibility. There are confidence metrics associated with each volume, and users can define their collection of, say, poetry more broadly or narrowly by adjusting the confidence thresholds for inclusion. So even this dataset is not really a single map.

“What about divisions below the page level?”

With the exception of divisions between running headers and body text, we don’t address them. There are certainly a wide range of divisions below the page level that can matter, but we didn’t feel there was much to be gained by trying to solve all those problems at the same time as page-level mapping. In many cases, divisions below the page level are logically a subsequent step.

“How would I actually use this map to find stuff?”

There are three different ways — see “How to use this data?” in the interim report. If you’re working with HathiTrust Research Center, you could use this data to define a workset in their portal. Alternatively, if your research question can be answered with word frequencies, you could download public page-level features from HTRC and align them with our genre predictions on your own machine to produce a dataset of word counts from “only pages that have a 97% probability of being prose fiction,” or what have you. (HTRC hasn’t released feature counts for all the volumes we mapped yet, but they’re about to.) You can also align our predictions directly with HathiTrust zip files, if you have those. The pagealigner module in the utilities subfolder of our Github repo is intended as a handy shortcut for people who use Python; it will work both with HT zip files and HTRC feature files, aligning them with our genre predictions and returning a list of pages zipped with genre codes.

Is this sort of collection really what I need for my project?

Maybe not. There are a lot of books in HathiTrust. But as I admitted in my last post, a medium-sized collection based on bibliographies may be a better starting point for most scholars. Library-based collections include things like reprints, works in translation, juvenile fiction, and so on, that could be viewed as giving a fuller picture of literary culture … or could be viewed as messy complicating factors. I don’t mean to advocate for a library-based approach; I’m just trying to expand the range of alternatives we have available.

“What if I want to find fiction in French books between 1900 and 1970?”

Although we’ve made our code available as a resource, we definitely don’t want to represent it as a “tool” that could simply be pointed at other collections to do the same kind of genre mapping. Much of the work involved in this process is domain-specific (for instance, you have to develop page-level training data in a particular language and period). So this is better characterized as a method than a tool, and the report is probably more important than the repo. I plan to continue expanding the English-language map into the twentieth century (algorithmic mapping of genre may in fact be especially necessary for distant reading behind the veil of copyright). But I don’t personally have plans to expand this map to other languages; I hope someone else will take up that task.

As a reward for reading this far, here’s a visualization of the relative sizes of genres across time, represented as a percentage of pages in the English-language portion of HathiTrust.

The relative sizes of different genres, represented as a percentage of pages in the English-language portion of HathiTrust. 854,476 volumes are covered. Nonfiction, front matter, and back matter aren't represented here. Results have been smoothed with a five-year moving average.
The relative sizes of different genres, represented as a percentage of pages in the English-language portion of HathiTrust. 854,476 volumes are covered. Nonfiction, front matter, and back matter aren’t represented here. Results have been smoothed with a five-year moving average. Click through to enlarge.

The image is discussed at more length in the interim progress report.

Acknowledgments

The blog post above often slips awkwardly into first-person plural, because I’m describing a project that involved a lot of people. Parts of the code involved were written by Michael L. Black and Boris Capitanu. The code also draws on machine learning libraries in Weka and Scikit-Learn [6, 7]. Shawn Ballard organized the process of gathering training data, assisted by Jonathan Cheng, Nicole Moore, Clara Mount, and Lea Potter. The project also depended on collaboration and conversation with a wide range of people at HathiTrust Digital Library, HathiTrust Research Center, and the University of Illinois Library, including but not limited to Loretta Auvil, Timothy Cole, Stephen Downie, Colleen Fallaw, Harriett Green, Myung-Ja Han, Jacob Jett, and Jeremy York. Jana Diesner and David Bamman offered useful advice about machine learning. Essential material support was provided by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. None of these people or agencies should be held responsible for mistakes.

References

[1] Perhaps it goes without saying, since the phrase has now lost its quotation marks, but “distant reading” is Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000).

[2] Hadley Wickham, ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. http: //had.co.nz/ggplot2/book. Springer New York, 2009.

[3] Having mapped advertisements in volumes of fiction, I’m pretty certain that they’re responsible for the spike in dollar signs in Google’s “English Fiction” collection. The collection I mapped overlaps heavily with Google Books, and the number of pages of ads in fiction volumes tracks very closely with the frequency of dollars signs, “8vo,” and so on.

Percentage of pages in mostly-fiction volumes that are ads. Based on a filtered collection of 102,349 mostly-fiction volumes selected from a larger group of 854,476 volumes 1700-1922.
Percentage of pages in mostly-fiction volumes that are ads. Based on a filtered collection of 102,349 mostly-fiction volumes selected from a larger group of 854,476 volumes 1700-1922. Five-year moving average.

[4] “The great unread” comes from Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 23.

[5] See the interim report (subsection, “Evaluating Confusion Matrices”) for a fuller description; it gets complicated, because we actually assessed accuracy in terms of the number of words misclassified, although the classification was taking place at a page level.

[6] F. Pedregosa, G. Varoquaux, A. Gramfort, V. Michel, B. Thirion, O. Grisel, M. Blondel, P. Prettenhofer, R. Weiss, V. Dubourg, J. Vanderplas, A. Passos, D. Cournapeau, M. Brucher, M. Perrot, and E. Duchesnay. Scikit-learn: Machine learning in Python. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 12:2825–2830, 2011.

[7] Mark Hall, Eibe Frank, Geoffrey Holmes, Bernhard Pfahringer, Peter Reutemann, and Ian H. Witten. The WEKA data mining software: An update. SIGKDD Explorations, 11(1), 2009.

Categories
18c 19c 20c collection-building fiction representativeness

Distant reading and the blurry edges of genre.

There are basically two different ways to build collections for distant reading. You can build up collections of specific genres, selecting volumes that you know belong to them. Or you can take an entire digital library as your base collection, and subdivide it by genre.

Most people do it the first way, and having just spent two years learning to do it the second way, I’d like to admit that they’re right. There’s a lot of overhead involved in mining a library. The problem becomes too big for your desktop; you have to schedule batch jobs; you have to learn to interpret MARC records. All this may be necessary eventually, but it’s not the ideal place to start.

But some of the problems I’ve encountered have been interesting. In particular, the problem of “dividing a library by genre” has made me realize that literary studies is constituted by exclusions that are a bit larger and more arbitrary than I used to think.

First of all, why is dividing by genre even a problem? Well, most machine-readable catalog records don’t say much about genre, and even if they did, a single volume usually contains multiple genres anyway. (Think introductions, indexes, collected poems and plays, etc.) With support from the ACLS and NEH, I’ve spent the last year wrestling with that problem, and in a couple of weeks I’m going to share an imperfect page-level map of genre for English-language books in HathiTrust 1700-1923.

But the bigger thing I want to report is that the ambiguity of genre may run deeper than most scholars who aren’t librarians currently imagine. To be sure, we know that subgenres like “detective fiction” are social institutions rather than natural forms. And in a vague way we also accept that broader categories like “fiction” and “poetry” are social constructs with blurry edges. We can all point to a few anomalies: prose poems, eighteenth-century journalistic fictions like The Spectator, and so on.

But somehow, in spite of knowing this for twenty years, I never grasped the full scale of the problem. For instance, I knew the boundary between fiction and nonfiction was blurry in the 18c, but I thought it had stabilized over time. By the time you got to the Victorians, surely, you could draw a circle around “fiction.” Exceptions would just prove the rule.

Selecting volumes one by one for genre-specific collections didn’t shake my confidence. But if you start with a whole library and try to winnow it down, you’re forced to consider a lot of things you would otherwise never look at. I’ve become convinced that the subset of genre-typical cases (should we call them cis-genred volumes?) is nowhere near as paradigmatic as literary scholars like to imagine. A substantial proportion of the books in a library don’t fit those models.

This is both a photograph of a real, unnamed mother and baby, and a picture of a fictional character named Shinkah. Frontispiece to Shinkah, The Osage Indian (1916).
This is both a photograph of a real, unnamed mother and baby, and a picture of a fictional character named Shinkah. Frontispiece to Shinkah, The Osage Indian (1916).

Consider the case of Shinkah, the Osage Indian, published in 1916 by S. M. Barrett. The preface to this volume informs us that it’s intended as a contribution to “the sociology of the Osage Indians.” But it’s set a hundred years in the past, and the central character Shinkah is entirely fictional (his name just means “child.”) On the other hand, the book is illustrated with photographs of real contemporary people, who stand for the characters in an ethnotypical way.

After wading though 872,000 volumes, I’m sorry to report that odd cases of this kind are more typical of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction than my graduate-school training had led me to believe. There’s a smooth continuum for instance between Shinkah and Old Court Life in France (1873), by Frances Elliot. This book has a bibliography, and a historiographical preface, but otherwise reads like a historical novel, complete with invented dialogue. I’m not sure how to distinguish it from other historical novels with real historical personages as characters.

Literary critics know there’s a problem with historical fiction. We also know about the blurry boundary between fiction, journalism, and travel writing represented by the genre of the “sketch.” And anyone who remembers James Frey being kicked out of Oprah Winfrey’s definition of nonfiction knows that autobiographies can be problematic. And we know that didactic fiction blurs into philosophical dialogue. And anyone who studies children’s literature knows that the boundary between fiction and nonfiction gets especially blurry there. And probably some of us know about ethnographic novels like Shinkah. But I’m not sure many of us (except for librarians) have added it all up. When you’re sorting through an entire library you’re forced to see the scale of it: in the period 1700-1923, maybe 10% of the volumes that could be cataloged as fiction present puzzling boundary cases.

You run into a lot of these works even if you browse or select titles at random; that’s how I met Shinkah. But I’ve also been training probabilistic models of genre that report, among other things, how certain or uncertain they are about each page. These models are good at identifying clear cases of our received categories; I found that they agreed with my research assistants almost exactly as often as the research assistants agreed with each other (93-94% of the time, about broad categories like fiction/nonfiction). But you can also ask a model to sift through several thousand volumes looking for hard cases. When I did that I was taken aback to discover that about half the volumes it had most trouble with were things I also found impossible to classify. The model was most uncertain, for instance, about The Terrific Register (1825) — an almanac that mixes historical anecdote, urban legend, and outright fiction randomly from page to page. The second-most puzzling book was Madagascar, or Robert Drury’s Journal (1729), a book that offers itself as a travel journal by a real person, and was for a long time accepted as one, although scholars have more recently argued that it was written by Defoe.

Of course, a statistical model of fiction doesn’t care whether things “really happened”; it pays attention mostly to word frequency. Past-tense verbs of speech, personal names, and “the,” for instance, are disproportionately common in fiction. “Is” and “also” and “mr” (and a few hundred other words) are common in nonfiction. Human readers probably think about genre in a more abstract way. But it’s not particularly miraculous that a model using word frequencies should be confused by the same examples we find confusing. The model was trained, after all, on examples tagged by human beings; the whole point of doing that was to reproduce as much as possible the contours of the boundary that separates genres for us. The only thing that’s surprising is that trawling the model through a library turns up more books right in the middle of the boundary region than our habits of literary attention would have suggested.

A lot of discussions of distant reading have imagined it as a move from canonical to popular or obscure examples of a (known) genre. But reconsidering our definitions of the genres we’re looking for may be just as important. We may come to recognize that “the novel” and “the lyric poem” have always been islands floating in a sea of other texts, widely read but never genre-typical enough to be replicated on English syllabi.

In the long run, this may require us to balance two kinds of inclusiveness. We already know that digital libraries exclude a lot. Allen Riddell has nicely demonstrated just how much: he concludes that there are digital scans for only about 58% of the novels listed in bibliographies as having been published between 1800 and 1836.

One way to ensure inclusion might be to start with those bibliographies, which highlight books invisible in digital libraries. On the other hand, bibliographies also make certain things invisible. The Terrific Register (1825), for instance, is not in Garside’s bibliography of early-nineteenth-century fiction. Neither is The Wonder-Working Water Mill (1791), to mention another odd thing I bumped into. These aren’t oversights; Garside et. al. acknowledge that they’re excluding certain categories of fiction from their conception of the novel. But because we’re trained to think about novels, the scale of that exclusion may only become visible after you spend some time trawling a library catalog.

I don’t want to present this as an aporia that makes it impossible to know where to start. It’s not. Most people attempting distant reading are already starting in the right place — which is to build up medium-sized collections of familiar generic categories like “the novel.” The boundaries of those categories may be blurrier than we usually acknowledge. But there’s also such a thing as fretting excessively about the synchronic representativeness of your sample. A lot of the interesting questions in distant reading are actually trends that involve relative, diachronic differences in the collection. Subtle differences of synchronic coverage may more or less drop out of questions about change over time.

On the other hand, if I’m right that the gray areas between (for instance) fiction and nonfiction are bigger and more persistently blurry than literary scholarship usually mentions, that’s probably in the long run an issue we should consider! When I release a page-level map of genre in a couple of weeks, I’m going to try to provide some dials that allow researchers to make more explicit choices about degrees of inclusion or exclusion.

Predictive models that report probabilities give us a natural way to handle this, because they allow us to characterize every boundary as a gradient, and explicitly acknowledge our compromises (for instance, trade-offs between precision and recall). People who haven’t done much statistical modeling often imagine that numbers will give humanists spuriously clear definitions of fuzzy concepts. My experience has been the opposite: I think our received disciplinary practices often make categories seem self-evident and stable because they teach us to focus on easy cases. Attempting to model those categories explicitly, on a large scale, can force you to acknowledge the real instability of the boundaries involved.

References and acknowledgments

Training data for this project was produced by Shawn Ballard, Jonathan Cheng, Lea Potter, Nicole Moore and Clara Mount, as well as me. Michael L. Black and Boris Capitanu built a GUI that helped us tag volumes at the page level. Material support was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. Some information about results and methods is online as a paper and a poster, but much more will be forthcoming in the next month or so — along with a page-level map of broad genre categories and types of paratext.

The project would have been impossible without help from HathiTrust and HathiTrust Research Center. I’ve also been taught to read MARC records by librarians and information scientists including Tim Cole, M. J. Han, Colleen Fallaw, and Jacob Jett, any of whom could teach a course on “Cursed Metadata in Theory and Practice.”

I mention Garside’s bibliography of early nineteenth-century fiction. This is Garside, Peter, and Rainer Schöwerling. The English novel, 1770-1829 : a bibliographical survey of prose fiction published in the British Isles. Ed. Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Paul Fyfe directed me to a couple of useful works on the genre of the sketch. Michael Widner has recently written a dissertation about the cognitive dimension of genre titled Genre Trouble. I’ve also tuned into ongoing thoughts about the temporal and social dimensions of genre from Daniel Allington and Michael Witmore. The now-classic pamphlet #1 from the Stanford Literary Lab, “Quantitative Formalism,” is probably responsible for my interest in the topic.