I’m nearing the end of my first week at DSHI 2019! I’ve been taking “Introduction to Computation for Literary Criticism” with David Wrisley and Randa El Khatib. They have been extraordinarily helpful in introducing me (and the rest of the class) to a wide array of tools and methods for thinking about text visualizations, networks, mapping and stylometry. Below, I’ve attached several images with some preliminary explorations of how I might used data visualizations to explore the “mpreg” (male pregnancy) trope in fan fiction writing. The corpus that I’m working with draws from the Teen Wolf (TV) fandom on Archive of Our Own  (AO3).

The two word clouds below come from Voyant. The first illustrates how central two of the show’s characters are in the majority of mpreg fan works.  Despite limited interaction in the actual show, these fanfiction writers frequently pair the two up. (Over half of the 100,000+ stories written about the Teen Wolf  fandom on AO3 feature Stiles and Derek, Sterek, as a romantic couple). “Stiles” has  a total count of 2,765, and “Derek” has 1,848 mentions. This drops off drastically, with the the third highest term being “says” at 595.

By editing the list of stopwords (removing the main characters’ names and looking only at the nouns that appear in the texts), Voyant allows us to hone in on other concepts that seem important to this trope: other characters, domestic details, embodiment, etc.

Short post, but I’m already getting ready for Week 2 of DHSI: Introduction to Electronic Literature!