In 2021, I got involved in a collaborative academic research initiative called the Endo/Exo Writers Project, while taking a course with Professor Lennard Davis at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The project’s website, which I helped develop, was recently launched.

The project “analyzes the representation of poverty and class in American and British long-form writing published between 1840 and 1940.” It includes fellow grad students at the UIC English department as well as international participation from Professor Alexander Dunst, based at the University of Paderborn in Germany.

Given my background working with data, for the course I took with Professor Davis I decided to try and advance the project with an experiment in computational analysis of text.

The research I did took two 19th century novels about the poor, Hard Times by Charles Dickens and Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell. The novels share other traits: they’re both about the struggle between labor and capital in the industrial north of England, written around the same time.

I turned the novels into data by extracting the dialogue, then classifying the dialogue by character grouped by socio-economic class. Then I tested some ideas against these groupings: elevated speech, mannerly speech, expressions of religiosity would appear more or less often depending on how the novelist depicted these characters of different social classes.

You can see a set of slides presenting my research (which should be considered a work in progress) on the Endo/Exo website’s Work-in-Progress page. I also presented the slides at UIC’s Digital Humanities Initiative to a small group in the DHI’s grad student network.