The Social Lives of Books: Mapping the Ideational Networks of Toni Morrison

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Authorship
  1. 1. Edward Finn

    English - Stanford University

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1
The Social Lives of Books:
Mapping the Ideational
Networks of Toni Morrison
Finn, Edward
edfinn@stanford.edu
Department of English, Stanford University,
USA
1. Overview
This paper is a case study that is part
of a larger Ph.D. dissertation project: an
exploration of the networks of references
and ideas that make up the social lives of
books online. In a time of rapidly evolving
ecologies of reading and writing, I argue
that the Internet affords us massive amounts
of new data on previously invisible cultural
transactions. New architectures for reviewing,
discussing and sharing books blur the lines
separating readers, authors and critics, and
these cultural structures capture thousands
of conversations, mental connections and
personal recommendations that previously went
unrecorded. I call these webs of references,
allusions and recommendations ideational
networks. Using Toni Morrison’s career as a
model, I will closely examine the ideational
networks surrounding her work using the
methodologies of social network analysis in
order to define a new, statistically informed
conception of cultural capital in the digital era.
2. Background
My project is founded on the argument that
as literary production evolves, new kinds
of reading communities and collaborative
cultural entities are emerging. Many of these
communities are ephemeral and quite often they
are fostered by commercial interests seeking
to capitalize on their cultural production.
Nevertheless, a handful of websites like Amazon
continue to dominate the marketplace for
books and attract millions of customer reviews,
ratings and purchase decisions, and the literary
ecologies of these book reviews have become
valuable research resources. The ideational
networks I explore are made up of first books,
authors, characters and other literary entities
(these are the nodes), and second the references
linking them together as collocations in book
reviews, suggestions from recommendation
engines, and other architectures of connection.
Advancing from my first case study, Thomas
Pynchon, to Morrison’s ideational networks, I
have discovered the utility of social network
analysis methodologies to better analyze graphs
of these literary references. With new data and
new tools, I hope to trace the networks of
influence and exchange that have contributed
to making Toni Morrison arguably the most
critically acclaimed and popularly successful
author in the United States.
3. Proposal
This paper will present my research on the
ideational networks surrounding the works of
Toni Morrison. Morrison makes an excellent
subject for this kind of study for a number of
reasons. As a Nobel laureate and widely read
popular author, she has attracted millions of
devotees. In her writing she often draws on
the African American literary tradition of the
talking book, and throughout her career she has
explored the ontological power of narrative to
create and destroy worlds. It is not surprising,
then, that as an author she is deeply committed
to expanding the act of reading not only to
include millions of people, especially women,
who never considered themselves readers
before, but also to changing its definition to
include conversation, community, and a kind
of collaborative reflection. This element of
Morrison’s authorial appeal is best exemplified
by her long-running association with Oprah’s
Book Club, an enterprise that has had a huge
impact on the U.S. publishing industry and on
conceptions of reading as a social act.
My presentation will explore the communities
of readership that have emerged around
Morrison’s work and consider the literary
company in which her readers and reviewers
perceive her. Focusing on a limited set of
professional book reviews, reader reviews and
recommendations from a dataset of print
media, Amazon and LibraryThing, I will map
out connections that reviewers and consumers
have made between Morrison’s works and
other literary figures and texts (see Figure
1). I believe these connections will delineate

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Morrison’s position as an extremely popular
author who nevertheless challenges her readers
to grapple with unflinching, emotionally raw
narratives. Her books have introduced millions
to deeply troubled corners of American history,
combining a modernist style with diverse
literary traditions in a way that is both acutely
culturally specific and universally compelling. I
hypothesize that these factors have driven her
remarkable ability to create togetherness and
communities of readership even as she traces
out the wounds and scars of division, inequality
and bias latent in American culture. I also hope
to contrast her ideational networks with those of
Thomas Pynchon, who has pursued a radically
different literary approach through his aversion
to publicity and his recondite fiction.
Figure 1: Sample image from work in progress of a Morisson
ideational network based on Amazon's recommendation engine.
Here the nodes are books connected together by Amazon's
"Customers who bought this also bought" feature, centered
on Morisson's novels in the middle. Arrows indicate direction
(i.e. Twain's
Huckleberry Finn
is recommended from O'Brien's
The Things They Carried
, but not vice versa). Note both the
range of texts and the cultural vectors present, with syllabus
classics like Salinger, Steinbeck, Miller and Howthorne moving
down from the center, canonical Native American writers at
the top left, etc. Visualization based on Prefuse Java Toolkit.
4. Methodology
This argument will draw on results from several
specific datasets of ideational networks.
I have collected professional book reviews
from a set of major U.S. newspapers
and magazines that consistently reviewed
Morrison’s publications. These will be analyzed
along with customer reviews from Amazon’s
product pages for Morrison’s works, which
have been accumulating reviews since 1996.
Employing the MorphAdorner project’s Named
Entity Recognition tool, I am assembling a
dictionary of proper nouns that reviewers use
as literary references in discussing Morrison’s
work. Tagging those references in the reviews,
I will then explore collocations of references to
construct network graphs of the books, authors
and other literary entities that reviewers link
together.
I have also assembled a database of book
recommendations using Amazon’s “Customers
who bought this also bought” engine and
LibraryThing’s recommendation engine. These
links provide a valuable counterpoint to those
works that reviewers choose to mention,
since these recommendations are generated by
indirect user actions (i.e. when a user buys,
reviews or catalogs multiple texts and thereby
creates a statistical association among them).
Recommendation engines attempt to mimic
or track the sale and ownership of cultural
products, creating a feedback loop of cultural
consumer desire, while review analysis explores
a more abstract realm of ideational exchange.
Using methodologies of social network analysis,
I will identify those works and authors with the
most prestige (i.e. the books most frequently
recommended) and centrality (i.e. the author
who is best-connected to other authors) in these
networks and consider the role of Morrison’s
texts as centers of ideational networks and,
potentially, as bridges between different genre
or category groupings. I also hope to explore the
role of clustering effects in these networks to
see if they are based on predictable factors like
genre.
Depending on the speed of my progress with
the objectives above and the cooperation of
Oprah’s Book Club, I also hope to explore the
networks of discussion and dialog that have
emerged around Morrison’s long collaboration
with Oprah Winfrey, which has inspired millions
of people to take up or return to reading as
a leisure activity in adult life. I hope to apply
similar methodologies of literary reference to
see how Book Club participants contextualized
Morrison.
5. Conclusion
As I continue to refine my understanding
of ideational networks and improve the
methodologies necessary to study them, I
am beginning to develop techniques that can

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Conference Info

Complete

ADHO - 2010
"Cultural expression, old and new"

Hosted at King's College London

London, England, United Kingdom

July 7, 2010 - July 10, 2010

142 works by 295 authors indexed

XML available from https://github.com/elliewix/DHAnalysis (still needs to be added)

Conference website: http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/

Series: ADHO (5)

Organizers: ADHO

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  • Language: English
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