Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom describes the day-to-day depredations of four libertines who essentially quarantine in a remote castle with several men, women, boys, and girls. The text, never finished, is repulsive and hard to read, but it also says important things about power, fascism, and sexuality. The disturbing content of the narrative makes it difficult to analyze objectively or statistically, so I thought that mining the text might reveal patterns, trends, and structure that are difficult to discern in a text that affectively troubles the reader in its abjection.

I chose Voyant because it offers all the modes of analysis I wanted, and I used a pdf of the text digitized by Supervert 32C. Sade’s use of language is repetitive and even mechanical (although the vocabulary density is .067). I looked at which terms occur most frequently using the cirrus tool. I added several trivial terms into the stopword list in order to focus on those that reveal the thematic and bodily fixations of the text. I was surprised to find that “little” is the most recurrent word. This fact demonstrates the extent to which hebephilia and ephebophilia are the dominant themes of the text, or the the dominant perversions practiced by the libertines. We can see that the taboo the text most transgresses is that of the abuse of pubescent children.

And, since the text is so concerned with the body, I was interested in which parts it most emphasizes. I found that the text most emphasizes “mouth,” then “ass,” then “prick.” The text’s anal and oral fixations may relate to its obsession with children. We can also see that the text’s eroticism is most dependent on non-genital organs. I would be interested in further analysis of the “body” of the text, such as a visualization of a homunculus whose body parts are sized in proportion to their appearance in the text.

Using the terms tool, I identified how often each major character appears. From greatest to least, the order is: the Duc, the aristocrat; Curval, the judge; Duclos, prostitute/story-teller; Durcet, the banker; and lastly, the Bishop. This order suggests a hierarchy among the four libertines and their corresponding social institutions, and it’s notable that Duclos, the chief madam, appears more often than two of the libertines.

The trends graph of the five major characters shows that they all follow fairly regular sine-wave oscillations, although the Duc and Curval occur more frequently in the last sections, while the Bishop and Durcet occur less frequently. Duclos follows the most regular oscillations, which reflects her role in the structure of the novel: she opens each day with an erotic story, then recedes into the background as the libertines reenact it, until the cycle repeats next day.

There are many other directions a mining analysis of this text could go (an analysis of the distribution of abstract concepts, seeing how gender correlates with age, comparing individual days).

In “How to Not Teach Digital Humanities,” Ryan Cordell makes DH take a hard look in the mirror. Or rather, he accuses DH of too much self-contemplation, of asking one too many times “What is DH?” Cordell ventures that students aren’t really interested in these “meta-academic” questions, and that professors would do better to stick to more direct theory and practice. I agree—as an emerging field, I think DH defines itself better through practice than self-questioning.

Cordell honestly reflects on mistakes he made in designing his own DH curriculum, and shows sympathy to critics of the field. On digitality, he remarks that many students suffer from digital exhaustion, and gravitate to the humanities to read and think deeply away from more “practical” and “technical” fields. Rather than a way to appeal to attention-deficit, internet-addicted teens, from this perspective DH will only repulse them.

I agreed with Cordell that DH should try to temper its perhaps unseemly digitality by placing itself on a long timeline of evolving media (integration), and that DH would do well to introduce itself in small doses into humanities courses.

https://arcg.is/0quXqK

I used ArcGIS StoryMaps to map active and defunct jail facilities in New York City. My map intends to visualize the presence and distribution of these facilities in the city, so as to correct against the tendency of these facilities to become invisible and hidden.

Method

I sourced data on the facilities from the Bureau of Prisons, the NYC Department of Corrections, and Wikipedia. I used blue markers for active facilities and red markers for defunct facilities. In my annotations, I included the lifespan of each facility and distinguishing details. I tried to make my map “non-sovereign” by avoiding dehumanizing language like “inmates,” and instead making clear that people are confined in these “facilities.”

Findings

The map shows that jails and prisons have historically been concentrated in Manhattan and around the East River. The map also shows that the number of active facilities is rivaled by the number of defunct facilities. Eight out of ten of the facilities operated by the NYC DOC are located on Rikers, and a more detailed map would lay out the size and distribution of facilities on the island. It’s interesting to note that, outside of Rikers, there are as many federal facilities as there are NYC DOC facilities in the city.

Conclusion

I found ArcGIS easy to use but limited, as you can’t easily integrate graphs into the map or visualize data. I also could have used a feature to better integrate timelines or chronology. The program is perhaps most useful for drawing connections between different locations.

My map shows that jails and prisons are historically quite populous in NYC, and asks what it means for a city to have so many sites of confinement. How does our liberty relate to their confinement? Further, by visualizing the sites of closed prisons during our current wave of prison closures, the map anticipates a an abolitionist future in which prisons are a historical anomaly.