Department of English – Rhetoric and Composition Generating topoi: Topic Modeling and Visualization of the American Annals of the Deaf Adam Lerner Department of English – Rhetoric and Composition Engl 620

Manualism Versus Oralism Edward Miner Gallaudet Alexander Graham Bell

The Suppression of American Sign Language Milan conference of 1880 Nearly 40% of all Deaf students in schools where ASL was banned In 20 years, that number would be 80% Deaf educators made up 40% of all teachers of the Deaf in the mid 19th century By the early 20th century, that number would be 16%

The Problem and Consequences Teaching oral English to Deaf students is time-consuming and labor-intensive Research in the 1960’s and 70’s on academic achievement and literacy 1880-1960: Referred to as the “dark ages” of Deaf history

The American Annals of the Deaf Quarterly journal that began publishing in 1847 Still the flagship journal for Deaf scholarship. Content varies issue to issue 620 issues, almost 37,000 pages How do we explore this corpus?

Topic Modeling in MALLET Developed by Andrew McCallum at UMass Amherst In this project, an exploratory tool and not a critical tool Generates a list of words, which is then interpreted by a researcher

Dealing with Data Output of Mallet: deaf Institution signs mutes mute Deaf great hearing means number Dr Annals mind thought Dumb present study natural subject child order general man knowledge articulation Topoi: “Seats from which arguments are derived” – Cicero, Topica How can we visualize these topoi?

Visualization with Gephi Gephi: An open-source network visualization software

Visualization with Gephi When combined with topic weight by document, discovering where a topic is located is possible.

Exploring Data “Consanguineous Marriage As Cause of Deaf-Mutism” by D. De Haerne, from Belgium Cites population data from Lefebvre (who worked in Belgium) Suggests Catholics have the lowest rate of consanguineous marriages

Future Directions Digitally processing and visualizing The Silent Worker newspaper, which ran from 1888-1929 Deaf American writers wrote almost all of the articles Could provide an important look into the Deaf community during a difficult period in their history Developing a web platform for displaying articles, topic models, and visualizations