1. 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

2. Manualism Versus Oralism
Edward Miner Gallaudet
Alexander Graham Bell

3. 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%

4. 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
: Referred to as
the “dark ages” of Deaf history

5. 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?

6. 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

7. 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?

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

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

11. 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

12. Future Directions
Digitally processing and visualizing The Silent Worker newspaper, which ran from
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