Was Shakespeare Really Shakespeare? "Shakespeare has now fully entered the era of Big Data."

Is Shakespeare really Shakespeare?  This is a question I pose whenever I'm asked about what is digital humanities.  In Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, two chapters are devoted to application of stylometry to Shakespeare's works and goes into much detail.   "Authorship and the evidence of stylometrics" by MacDonald Jackson and "What does textual evidence reveal about the author?" by James Mardock and Eric Rasmussen discuss an interesting aspect of these studies is that computer models using different algorithms come to similar conclusions as scholars from the "analog" era.

In 2013, The New Oxford Shakespeare made ripples in the literary world credited Christopher Marlowe as a co-author of Shakespeare’s “Henry VI,” Parts 1, 2, and 3.  Now, I've along with many throughout our literary studies have been told that there's an inevitable Marlowe-Shakespeare connection, but it isn't until more recently that scholars using distant reading techniques have used computer-aided analysis of linguistic patterns across databases to further this argument, and as Gary Taylor proposes that "Shakespeare has now fully entered the era of Big Data."   Daniel Pellock-Pelzner points out that writing a play in the sixteenth century was a bit like writing a screenplay today, with many hands revising a company’s product.   The difference is that scholars from the New Oxford Shakespeare reduces the long-held hypothesis since the Victorian era that algorithms can truly tease out the work of individual hands. 

I'm really fascinated to continue exploring this facet of literary studies, and I'm just at the beginning of my own journey.  I'm currently working on data in the sense of using R programming (which is also used in stylometry) to study the early Chinese migrants coming to Canada, and studying the data to discern patterns of migration and kinship networks.   Certainly, dipping into the literary and the historical analysis is very much in the spirit of DH. 

Mining Register of Headtax Records using R and Palladio

In 2009, I began working with researchers and librarians UBC Library and SFU Library on a project that sought to collect and digitize materials from Chinese Canadian organizations across Canada.   That project ended in 2012 when funding from the federal government was completed.   Recently, Sarah Zhang and I began examining the 97,123 migrants who arrived in Canada between 1886 to 1949 that was painstakingly transformed to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet but has been largely untouched for the most part by researchers other than a few research papers.

Between 1885 and 1923, the Canadian government imposed a head tax on Chinese immigrants entering Canada in order to restrict immigration. While a print register was created to keep track of the influx of migrants, these detailed recordings have actually provided researchers and historians with years of demographic information about the immigrants and have become a rich source of data for researchers. Thanks to two scholars, Peter Ward and Henry Yu, and their teams at the History Department of the University of British Columbia, the Register of Chinese Immigrants to Canada (1886-1949) has been transformed to a digital spreadsheet, openly accessible from UBC Open Collection, and a searchable database accessible from Library and Archives Canada.

The main challenge of this headtax project from its inception is that as an impressively large-scale dataset, the records are for the most part incoherent as they show idiosyncratic dialects of the immigrants which result in variations of place names and titles. The inconsistencies in place names, unfortunately, lead to difficulties for anyone who wishes to exercise any analysis associated with the immigrants’ origins. In other words, while there is a treasure trove of data to use, it may be unusable for most unless there can be data manipulation that can unlock a better understanding of the missing gaps.  In other words, not much sense could be made of the data even though it was readily available.

To address these inconsistencies, in 2008 Eleanor Yuen from the UBC Asian Library initiated a project to normalize various transliterations of the immigrants’ origins and had laid the groundwork for more in-depth research for future researchers. The immigrants’ origins are represented at two hierarchical levels: county and villages/towns; there are eight counties and numerous villages in the registry. Of the eight counties, the names of villages/towns in three counties have been mapped: Sun Woy (now knownas Xinhui), Zhongshan, and Taishan. Although just a snippet of the records, this normalized data offers a true glimpse into the full impact of what is available in the research.

Since the completion of the digitization work, scholarship has drawn on the digital records from the project, manifesting differing methods and research findings. W. Peter Ward’s publication in 2013focused on the changes on the wellbeing of Chinese headtax immigrants, particularly analyzing the immigrants’ stature, a statistical indicator for wellbeing. He contrasted mean height by age of different age cohorts (one decade apart), and found a rising trend in stature over time: “a slow but significant increase in stature within the immigrant population from the middle of the 19th century to the early years of the Sino-Japanese War."  This increase in height, Ward speculated, can be attributed to the migration process itself.

In terms of methodology, Sarah and I felt that the previous studies discussed above haven’t yet demonstrated the potential of a great variety of computational tools, such as R, a statistical computational language, and Palladio, a network analysis tool developed by the Humanities + Design Lab at Stanford University.   We decided to continue with the research by building some datasets and opening up our discoveries in the Open Science Framework with intentions that our study can demonstrate and share the untapped potential of the head tax data while also providing testimony for new modes that librarians help shape digital scholarship and create promising new research questions for researchers.   Stay tuned for more!  In the meantime, please download the data and try it out!

Supporting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Our Canadian Libraries - Reflections From The Last Decade

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I recently presented at the Saskatchewan Libraries Association (SLA) 2019 with my colleagues Maha Kumaran and Jian Wang.   It was a self-reflective exercise, to distill a decade's worth of professional work as an academic librarian.   Perhaps Miu Chung Yan, a social work scholar puts it best when he asserts that a profession such as social work has its roots deeply embedded in colonialist origins, with a history steeped in British methodologies and history. Librarianship offers similar comparisons as it is deeply influenced by British and Anglo-American thinkers and practitioners.  As far back as 1946, Sidney Ditzion had already proposed that since America drew much of its cultural influence from the European continent, it is not surprising that librarianship should be one of them. To understand the bridge between librarianship and cultural diversity, one also needs to understand that the phenomenon is intrinsically tied to society as much as the profession. ALA leaders constituted an elite corps of Western Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) – mostly male, middle-class professionals immersed in the disciplinary and literary canons of the dominant culture and had shared a common ideology. However, when a profession lacks diversity, it, unfortunately, loses relevance for many of its users.  Libraries are a microcosm of society, and if libraries are not a reflection of our society, then there is a real cause for concern. 

As a librarian earning his stripes in a profession steeped in tradition and unwritten rules, it feels overwhelming at times. But I survived, and although still on my journey as a visible minority librarian, I have found some strategies that have worked for me in coping and performing at a high level as a professional librarian. Not only is being connected to fellow colleagues critical, but one must have commitment to his own professional and personal development at all times. Keeping abreast of technical knowledge and other developments in the field of librarianship is important, but equally vital is the soft skills such as interpersonal relations, confidence, and a positive mindset. As the oft-quoted screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg puts it, “It doesn't matter if you're the smartest person in the room: If you're not someone who people want to be around, you won't get far.”

I've written and published some of these strategies in Aboriginal and Visible Minority Librarians: Oral Histories From Canada, and shared some of these thoughts and reflections at SLA 2019.   I've been a part of VIMLOC for a number of years now, and I'm encouraged and proud to see how far it's come, but also how much more it needs to go to truly make an impact in Canadian libraries (and beyond).  Is it enough?   What do we need more to help us do more?   I encourage us all as librarians to think more broadly about our place in not only the profession but also in society: how we do help shape the future that is so highly influenced from the past?   How do we instill change, even though we are powerless in our own ways?   I challenge each and every one of you to start making a positive contribution by changing our perceptions of the status quo.