I was going to read a talk until I, and I sounded like I was stepping on my hotel room
today.
I said, like, don't read it, talk it.
So if this is a disaster, I'm risking that.
And I'm sorry if this ends up just being an ordeal for me and for you, but I'm going to
try and talk this.
Okay, so let me begin by talking about my title, which is not the title that I have in
the conference abstracts, Means and Ends in Civil War Nationalism and the Digital Humanities.
So I'm mostly going to be talking about Civil War Nationalism, which is probably not a topic
that a lot of you have a really deep interest in, as much of an interest for me.
So I was trying to think of, like, how do I, do I just apologize for this, or, and the
answer is no.
Like, I actually have an explanation for why I want to focus on 19th century Americans
from historiographic issues in this talk.
And that's the second part, is the digital humanities, because I don't get to this in
a moment.
What I've got in terms of Civil War Nationalism is using topic modeling to explore nationalism
as a means, as opposed to how it's often talked about in historiography, which is Civil War
Nationalism is an end, and I will explain that in a second.
But I thought that maybe, I don't know, a clever and actually honest way of explaining,
or trying to explain why I'm going to be focused mostly on the Civil War, is to talk a little
bit about the digital humanities and what we do in the digital humanities.
And it seems to me that sometimes we treat what should be a means, method, as an ends
in itself.
Right?
And I'm sure we've, I don't, I have not seen any talk like this at this conference, happily,
but I've, you know, been to digital humanities talks where somebody will be demonstrating
a tool or technique, and they'll make some kind of, like, token gesture, like, what you
might do analytically with this tool or technique.
And it strikes me like that's, like, that, that gestures both, strikes me as, like, an
afterthought and a forethought.
It's an afterthought in as much as the humanistic question is derived after the fact as an,
as almost an excuse and a justification for what they wanted to do tool-wise and technique-wise.
Like, this is, this is, we wanted this cool thing, and we got to think of a humanistic
question because we're in the digital humanities.
And then it's, like, a forethought in as much as it says, like, I'm just not going to do
really an analysis.
I'm going to talk about analysis that somebody might do in the future.
So it's this, like, this deferral, this aspirational notion of digital humanities, like, we'll
do the method stuff now, and then someday this is actually going to change the way we
think about the objects of the humanities, history, literature, culture, politics.
And I'm just not completely satisfied with this.
I mean, this is my work.
I really want to, the work I'm doing on the topic of all I know is an end in itself, but
a means towards a new understanding of the issues, the historical issues that I'm interested
in, the intellectual history of 19th century America, and, you know, some ways I'm thinking
about the audience for this is less, I mean, you know, I hate to say this is a terrible
thing, like, less you, and I really want the audience to be other Civil War historians
for the work that I'm doing.
So I'm going to, hopefully, that, I'm, hopefully this is going to be interesting, and hopefully
it's interesting as an illustration of an example of the analytical possibilities of
topic modeling.
Okay, so really briefly this kind of storyographic significance of the research, or what I think
is a storygraphical research, significance of the research that I'm doing, and what I
mean by means and ends in Civil War nationalism.
So there's two general approaches that I think typify the historiography in Civil War nationalism,
and both of these treat nationalism as a big end.
And so one of these, one of these threads treats nationalism as an ideological product,
and they explain, like, how you get nationalism, and in some ways this is an explanation like
how you get the war.
How do you get a group in the American South that can think of them and conceptualize themselves
as a distinct nation from people they were in the same country with just months earlier,
and on the other hand you get the Northerners who are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands
of lives to preserve a nation-state.
And then the second thread is an older and very still actor thread, looks at nationalism
during the war, and tries to kind of gauge its strength, particularly Confederate nationalism,
and there's two counterarguments here.
One is to characterize a weak nationalism.
You say Confederate nationalism is weak, and this is why they lost, right, but you get
all this disaffection of people who just don't have any investment in slavery, and they start
to peel off during the war.
Or you say, like, no, that's completely wrong, these guys gave up, you know, 29, a huge number
of Confederates die, I forget the percentage, but just massive numbers of white Confederate
men die despite being always outmanned and always outgunned.
So that, the strength of nationalism explains how you get five years, you get this war the
last four years when the Confederacy is by every objective measure completely outmeasured
by the industrial north.
So both of those, and that's the, one addresses causes, one addresses the outcome of the war,
but both treat nationalism as end, it's this quantifiable commodity that you categorize
as weak or strong, or it's this ideological product, and I think topic modeling allows
us to ask a different question, and treat it not as an end, but as a mean.
So what does nationalism do?
This is what I'm interested in, and I think it does many things during the war.
It's a tool, it has a kind of functional utility.
It's not just a thing that we measure and go, like, that's nationalism, and let me make
some very big argument about what it does.
I'm really interested in using topic modeling to say, like, nationalism does this for this
group of people on this state in particular ways, and this will differ for different groups,
for different people, for, in this case, for different newspapers.
So I'm looking at two newspapers, the Richmond Daily Dispatch and the New York Times in generating,
so one Confederate, one Union, in generating topic models out of them, and looking at what
topics that end up having what I characterize as nationalistic and patriotic rhetoric in
them.
So this is the 50 top words.
The top two are from, two topics from a topic model, the Richmond Daily Dispatch, the bottom
one from the New York Times.
So I'm not going to read 150 words, but I'll point out kind of certain things.
So you get, you get some really basic nationalism words, country, people, nation, home, et cetera.
You get, not surprisingly, you get a lot of words that you'd associate with war, battle,
soldier, arms, a lot more like that.
And then you get martial virtues, duty, honor, glorious.
And there are some differences that I could talk a little bit about between the, what
you see in the dispatch and what you see in the times, and those are not insignificant.
But what I'm more struck by and want to emphasize is the overlap and the similarity.
So this is a similar word.
So in the dispatch, out of those top 50 words in the times, 28 of them appear in one of
the topics from the dispatch and 20 of them appear in one of the, the other topic from
the dispatch.
So the, you know, the kind of short argument I make about this, and there's other ways
of demonstrating the same point using topic modeling.
The point I'd emphasize is that Northerners and Southerners are using the same language
of patriotism and nationalism, and this is the same vocabulary, not, not probably surprisingly.
But if we look at the graphs, when you start to chart the relative prominence of these
topics over the course of the war, I think these graphs, and I'll, this will be mostly
what I'll talk about today, they demonstrate that it's using the same language of nationalism
and patriotism.
They're using it towards, towards different political, military, emotional, social ends.
And that's really what I want to talk about.
So I've been, Jeffrey Rockwall here, I saw, I kind of coerced him into coming this morning,
and I, I've really found his notion of hybrid texts very useful for thinking about these
graphs and, and topic models more generally.
And topic models strike me as like a very, a perfect example of, of what he means by
a hybrid text.
And what he means by a hybrid text, I'll actually quote him, he says, a hybrid text is
authored not just by the original author.
So in my case, that would be everybody who wrote anything that appeared in the Richmond
Daily Dispatch or the New York Times.
This is again, quoting Jeffrey, but also by the user's choice and the procedures used
to generate it.
And so this case, that would be the topic modeling algorithm run with some chosen parameters,
most notably the number of topics.
So these are both 40 topics models for both of these.
So Rockwell's very comfortable calling hybrid texts, or he's more comfortable than me calling
hybrid text interpretations.
I'm, I'm calling, I'm more comfortable calling them analyses.
And I mean that in a really strict sense of the term.
This strikes me what topic modeling does is it's analytic in that it, it takes your text
and it separates them into, into their constituent elements, you know, the definition of analysis.
So it takes a collection of documents and groups them into groups of semantically, usually
related words.
But these, these graphs, the topics themselves, they strike me as very raw.
And I, I think they require, they both require traditional, more conventional interpretation.
They need to be read as text as do, as do the, the source texts themselves.
So I'm going to start by reading one of these source texts.
So this is a poem, just a kind of brief reading.
This is a poem that appeared in the spring of 1861, right after Virginia seceded as they're
starting for militia units.
This is a poem by W. Winston Fontaine.
And I want to talk about two stanzas from it.
Should we fall upon the field of tell me not we die in vain, the one who falls with freedom
shield is not among the nameless slain.
For poets sons and daughters fair of this, our own free southern land will sing of us
in point of error and name us in the hero band.
So a couple points about this.
So this is not an elegy, but it like anticipates future elegy's where Fontaine quite
explicitly mentions his future poets who will after he gets slaughtered and is all his fellow
soldiers get slaughtered, they're going to get poems written about them.
So we might say this is like a poetic and conditional promissory note where you die and you
are compensated posthumously with poems that will grant you some kind of glorious
literary mortality.
That's the deal you make, right?
You you perversely by dying get to be immortalized.
And the use of names in this is that seems to me like key, right?
Because you're not among the nameless slain, but you're named in the hero band, right?
Like you die and your name sticks in history forever.
I'm also really interested in the use of pronouns in this and polyvocalism in this two stanza.
So he uses his plural pronouns, we and us, rather than I and me.
And when he does use a singular, it's me in this case, he says he's it's to reverse himself in his
audience where he's putting his words in their mouths and they're speaking to him.
So he says, like, tell me not we die in vain, right?
So that gesture forges them into this transcendent whole.
And I, you know, I'm if I'm pushing it, I might say like he's kind of imagining a nation, this kind
of collectivity that that survives not despite the death of some of its members, but because of the
death of some of its members.
All right. So and I think this is this is my kind of reading of this topic, right?
That it's it takes death and suggests that this ensures this is a good thing for you.
And there's even there's perverse things like, you know, this guy just got his head blown off.
We all envy him.
This is this is kind of a common thing like that guy.
I'm just writing something about him and he's going to live forever in this poem that I'm writing.
And we should all be like him and get our head shot off.
OK, so that's a kind of one thing I note is like I had something pointed out to me recently is
that the words I'm emphasizing, the pronouns of the very stop words that LDA will ignore.
You know, so these are just words that considers useless and doesn't doesn't take into account.
And it's, you know, I don't think we need another illustration of the need to do conventional readings
and in combination with computationally aided text analysis.
But that strikes me as an illustration if we need it.
So I want to turn now to the graph of this.
This that's one example of of these kind of patriotic texts and a suggestion of what I think its purpose is.
It's rhetorical function.
And then I want to look at this graph of of the relative prominence of this rhetoric over the course of the war.
And I want to read the spikes like what did the spikes mean?
And the spikes that strikes me occur whenever you have a crisis of military recruitment in the Confederacy.
So in the spring and summer of 1861, that's the beginning of the war when the militia units are forming.
They sign people up for a year after a year, their faces crisis where you've you've gotten these guys,
you've got your trained army who are potentially not going to be soldiers anymore,
and you don't have enough men to build the ranks and the wars lasted longer than anybody expected it to.
So in April of 1861, you get a Confederate draft, you force men to go into the army,
and that is immediately followed by this massive spike in patriotic rhetoric.
And then the other spike I point out at the end of the war is just just that, you know,
everything's really going downhill for the Confederacy.
They've lost a lot of men and massive desertions and they resorted to what would would have been unthinkable.
I mean, the reason for the Confederacy is protect slavery.
And at the end of the war, they tentatively say to male slaves and their owners and get their owners permission.
But you can't fight for us. You get to be free. Right.
So the reason for the Confederacy, because this is how desperate they are. Right.
And so these moments of of crisis for in terms of Confederate recruitment are the moment when you get patriotic rhetoric in the in the paper.
I've called this somewhere else a cardiogram of the Confederate nation.
And I'm going to try and extend that metaphor a tiny bit.
And it seems like a cardiogram also measures stress.
And so these are the spikes of the stress points in the Confederacy.
And I think I'm trying to still figure out what just even the presence of patriotic rhetoric means.
And I I think the presence of patriotic public patriotic rhetoric in the paper is an indication of lack of or a weakness in like internalized patriotism.
Right. Because you need you have public rhetoric to manufacture patriotism, because these are the moments when you when patriotism is both most important and most fragile,
because these are the moments when the interests of the individual, i.e., not dying, are in most in the deepest conflict with the interests of the state going out and have these men die to preserve the nation state.
OK, so I'm going to get a second topic and I've this is my the second topic from the dispatch.
And I've disregarded scale here just to emphasize a similar either shape, right?
So you get the same spikes at the same moments. I'm not going to go into as much depth about this topic.
This is a I'm characterizing as more of a nationalism topic.
And it's the topic that attacks northerners as not Christian, as not civilized, as racially different and as as subhumans or or inhuman.
So reptiles, dogs, you know, their wild beasts ought to be hunted down.
This kind of rhetoric. And just to be really brief about it in the interest of time, this topic is not about dying.
It's about killing. This is a topic which characterizes northerners as well as these racially others, as he's not even human, as he's not Christian.
So it's not I mean, I think the message in the kind of collectively in these these articles is these diatribes, you might say, are really vicious.
It's not sinful to kill northerners. You have the six commandment, but that they're not they're not covered by this because of all these things.
So you're actually I mean, quite the opposite. God really hates these people because because they have departed from Christianity and they're not human beings.
So far from being sinful to go out and slaughter them, it's righteous.
You're doing God's will by going out and killing them.
So to sum up the dispatch, these are these are very different kinds of articles.
One's very this kind of patriotic, florid poetry.
The other is this vicious diatribe.
So I'm going to call them Philippics if I'm a generic term.
So remarkably different in tone and that in two different topics in my model.
But but they parallel one another and they do parallel work.
One's about alleviating anxieties about dying and the other's alleviating anxieties about killing.
And these are the two things you need to do to recruit men into the army.
Right. So this you understand the the utility, the the function, the instrumental purpose of nationalistic and patriotic rhetoric in the paper in the dispatch is to get men into the army.
So you can have an army and preserve the Confederate nation state.
Let me really. So this this is the other topic from the time.
We're going to be briefer about this.
The big spikes get a little bit of the same rhetoric, a little bit the same purpose.
You get this huge spike at the end in April 1865.
That's Lincoln's assassination.
So that's about death as well.
But I'm more interested in the sustained spikes in the fall and the falls of 1862 and 1864.
It's not as quite as the the rhetoric isn't quite as interesting, but the point is more provocative, I think,
which is that nationalistic rhetoric in the times is not about killing and dying.
It's about voting. It's not about bullets.
It's about ballots.
And so they use the same rhetoric.
But in the times, the which is a decidedly partisan Republican paper in the 1860s,
the function of this is to get men to go out and vote for Republicans.
Which strikes me as addressing the one of the major threats to the union, which is not a military threat.
It's a it's an internal threat.
It's it's it's the Democratic Party, which had adopted a peace platform in 1864.
That's the way the union would have unraveled.
Right. Is that you have this this demise of the popular will to continue the war.
And what then the way you counter that demise is you you keep pro-war Republicans in the party.
So I'm just going to briefly conclude with a methodological note.
And I would actually really welcome anybody's thoughts on this because I haven't thought through it myself.
Even in my abstract, I say, like, this is doing distant reading.
You're borrowing Franco Moretti's spectacular phrase.
And the more I've done this, the more I've I feel like this is not distant reading at all,
that that what we don't need for civil war patriotism and nationalism, that study,
we don't need more distance on this subject.
People who study this, they look at the root causes of the war. I'll be 30 seconds.
Root causes of the war and the outcome of the war.
Those are big interpretive questions.
What I think topic modeling allows us to do is to study national nationalism and nationalist rhetoric with more finessing subtlety.
Right. To really get into the nitty gritty of what this rhetoric is doing at particular moments in time for particular groups,
which is not distant reading at all, but it's something something more subtle than that.
So thank you very much.
OK, let's see now we.