Emotions in Eighteenth-Century Contact Zones

For several years I had been thinking about taking the plunge into the digital humanities. As exciting as the prospect was of creating a fruitful conversation between traditional literary analysis, multimodal literacy, and the processing of “big data,” I was skeptical of any formula of the combine-humanities-and-technology-and-stir approach to digital humanities. The exciting novelty of technology tends to threaten to overshadow the traditional literary analysis that I practice and which I don’t think can be substituted by online tools.

However, an unexpected budget thanks to a Nanyang Education Award Grant and some serendipitous conversations with Yi Shao Chan—a talented NTU graduate with training and skills in both literary and digital analysis—suggested that now would be the right time to tackle that skepticism. These conversations with Yi Shao coincided with redesigning my “Virgins and Vixens of Enlightenment England” module to focus on issues of eighteenth-century intersectionality. The course was accordingly redesigned to focus on “Women in Eighteenth-Century Contact Zones” and, given my research in feminist orientalism, it soon became clear that we could try creating an emotional map of what Edward Said called “imagined geography,” a term he used to describe the way societies imagine other societies using the imaginative projection enabled by cartography.

Yi Shao and I realized a global map would be a pretty daunting task, so we targeted specific locations (England, the West Indies, and Turkey) that recurred in the readings on the syllabus. There were other contact zones and geographic areas we could have focused on, but we had limited time (one month) and resources (our budget) and decided to focus on those three locations. We also decided to analyze references to these three locations in the following subset of texts: the anonymous early novel The Jamaica Lady (1720), the anonymous sentimental novel The Woman of Colour (1808), and the slave narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831).

Yi Shao used her familiarity with RStudio, the NRC Emotion Lexicon, and Syuzhet to graph charts that indicated the emotions associated with those three locations within those three texts. This blog is an overview of our findings, questions, concerns, and class discussions. We hope to continue the discussion during next semester’s module “The Rise of the Novel” (Fall 2018).

This is very much a work in progress and we welcome feedback!

Asst Prof Samara Anne Cahill (Nanyang Technological University)