This document discusses approaches to analyzing immigrant narratives found in literature. It questions whether there is a typical immigrant narrative and explores using computational methods like topic modeling and sentiment analysis to analyze plots across a corpus of immigrant novels from 1870-1940. The document considers issues around defining subjective relationships to nationality through text and balancing close reading of individual works with analysis of broader trends. It presents potential methods like using Syuzhet to model plot sentiment and applying topic modeling to an immigration subject corpus from HathiTrust. Feedback is sought on feasibility of different approaches and corpus sizes.

1. Is there a typical
immigrant narrative?
Approaches to modeling immigrant
autobiography using HathiTrust
Elizabeth Rodrigues, University of Michigan
@letsshall / esrod@umich.edu

2. Defining the immigrant narrative
As a subject of ongoing popular and scholarly interest, the “immigrant novel”
has been understood as a tale of arrival to a New World, which includes
trials of belief in the self and the new nation, optimism and obstacles,
economic and social acceptance, concluding with a disillusioned
Americanism.
...However, the archive of U.S. immigrant novels written between 1870
and 1940 makes evident that fewer novels than we might expect conform
to these conventions, and assumptions of uniformity—as Horatio Alger
stories, as novels of proletarian striving, as representations of masculinity, as
diasporic resettlement, even as stories of arrival—efface much of what
distinguishes them within the history of the U.S. novel.
--Joshua Miller, “The Immigrant Novel,” in Oxford History of the Novel

3. Goals for presenting
● feedback
o what parts seem interesting?
o what don’t I understand about what HT can do?
o tips for iterating through ideas?
o other approaches?
o feasibility/slicing?

4. Questions
● Are there any “typical” immigrant narratives?
● If a-typicality is in fact typical, does this have
its own form & how does it compare to other
contemporary forms? To other historical
periods of immigration?
● Can we contextualize close reading/claims
for individual author exceptionality in a
broader landscape?

5. Methodological considerations
● What am I trying to track in the text?
o A particular subjective relationship to nationality? Is
this possible w/o intense coding (eg milestone
events, location)?
o Overall plot structure? What is a good enough proxy
for plot?
o Affective oscillation between “celebratory” and
“suspicious”? Again, how to recognize?
● What scale is most illuminating?

6. Potential corpora
n=1: Constantine Panunzio’s Soul of an
Immigrant
n=17: imm a/b’s from period identified in HTC
n=??: imm narrative more broadly
n=996: subject = immigration, US, 1920-1922

7. Potential approaches
● modeling plot w/ R: Jockers’s Syuzhet
● topic modeling: using ready-made HTC
algorithm, other
● encoding

8. Syuzhet (by Matthew Jockers)
● uses sentiment as a proxy for plot
● can be usefully run on single texts
● R….
Example of modernist novel plotted w/ Matthew Jockers’s
Syuzhet
image: http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/

9. Topic modelling
● How to assemble a corpus from vastness of
HTC: non-trivial question
● have tried so far: searching via bibliography,
title contains “life story”
● subject search corpus much larger, but not
literary
● to take to other tools: what is reasonable
data request?

10. Test run of Auvil’s Meandre Topic Modelling in Immigrant Subject Corpus

11. Encoding
● existing biography schema (BESS @ UVA),
could build from that
● useful for close reading/ developing a critical
handle on what constitutes plot points
● manageable scope? preservation for small-
scale project?
● and how would that address single author
exceptionality?

12. Thoughts?
Thank you!
Liz Rodrigues
esrod@umich.edu
@letsshall