Detecting Modernismo’s Fingerprint: A Digital Humanities Approach to the Turn of the Century Spanish American Novel

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 There are a good number of Digital Humanities scholars in Latin America and the US that have been working on different cultural projects that involve in one way or another Latin America employing a wide range of digital tools and approaches. Nevertheless, we have yet to see a sustained effort by Latin American literary historians and critics to use these tools to find and study literary patterns.

2 González is referring to the crónica genre, but we believe the same applies to Modernista prose in general.

3 In a note in A Companion to Spanish American Modernismo, González mentions his updated list, which, he notes, “is not exhaustive.” We used the updated list. The only novels we were unable to obtain for our analyses were Luis Felipe Rodríguez's Cómo opinaba Damián Paredes and Rodríguez Mendoza’s Días romanos. In addition, Valdelomar’s Neuronas appears to be a very short collection of thoughts, aphorisms, and opinions, not a novel. Its inclusion here appears to be a mistake by González and we excluded it from our study. In total, we used a canon composed of thirty-six Modernista novels.

4 As of March 2018, these texts were Don Manuel de Paloche, Hacia la Justicia, and Libro extraño I by Francisco Sicardi; En la sangre, Sin rumbo, and Música sentimental by Eugenio Cambaceres; La novela de la sangre and El último grande de España by Carlos Octavio Bunge; Los fuereños, Baile y cochino, and La Noche Buena en Santander by José Tomás de Cuéllar; El casamiento de Laucha, Divertidas aventuras del nieto de Juan Moreira, and El falso Inca by Roberto Payró.

5 Some of the novels were scanned and OCRed by the authors of this study, while others came from web resources such as Hathitrust, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, prosamodernista.com, and ellibrototal.com, and the CLIS Github collection of Spanish American novels.

6 The results are normalized using z-scores and then for each of the words, the difference between the mean and the scores in each of the texts is compared. Delta is obtained from averaging the absolute values of the z-scores of all the words, resulting in a measure of difference between each text and the others in the group.

7 For the purposes of this section, we provisionally defined Modernista novelists as authors who were included in either González’s or Mejías-López’s canons.

8 Due to space constraints only some of the figures relating to this investigation can be displayed here. All the figures mentioned in the article are available online in digital format and can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2018.1540577. Figure 1a is also available here: https://github.com/jose-eduardo/Dectecting-Modernismo-Fingerprint/blob/master/figure1a.png

9 We decided to leave Darío’s Emelina out of this project as this is a work that was written in collaboration with Eduardo Poirier and its authorial fingerprint is obviously different from Darío’s other novels.

10 Figure 1b: https://github.com/jose-eduardo/Dectecting-Modernismo-Fingerprint/blob/master/figure1b.png

11 Figure 2: https://github.com/jose-eduardo/Dectecting-Modernismo-Fingerprint/blob/master/figure2.png

12 Figure 3a: https://github.com/jose-eduardo/Dectecting-Modernismo-Fingerprint/blob/master/figure3a.png

13 Figure 3b: https://github.com/jose-eduardo/Dectecting-Modernismo-Fingerprint/blob/master/figure3b.png

14 Figure 3c: https://github.com/jose-eduardo/Dectecting-Modernismo-Fingerprint/blob/master/figure3c.png

15 Figure 3d: https://github.com/jose-eduardo/Dectecting-Modernismo-Fingerprint/blob/master/figure3d.png

16 Another interesting observation is that these are the only two Modernista novels written before the publication of Darío’s Azul . . . , which brings to our attention the need to study the influence of Darío’s style during this period using quantitative methods as it has been done with other influential styles in history (see Eder 2016).

17 We used the following novels: Roqué’s Luz y sombra and Sara la obrera; Fernández de Tinoco’s Yonta and Zulai; Palma’s Por senda propia and Uno de tantos; Cáceres’s La princesa Suma Tica and La rosa muerta; Caramillo’s El secreto; Puga’s El voto.

18 Figure 4a: https://github.com/jose-eduardo/Dectecting-Modernismo-Fingerprint/blob/master/figure4a.png

19 Figure 4b: https://github.com/jose-eduardo/Dectecting-Modernismo-Fingerprint/blob/master/figure4b.png

Additional information

Notes on contributors

José Eduardo González

José Eduardo González is Associate Professor of Spanish and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of Appropriating Theory: Ángel Rama's Critical Work (2017). His most recent publication is Urban Spaces in Contemporary Latin American Literature (2018), a collection of essays by Latin Americanists, co-edited with Timothy R. Robbins.

Montserrat-Fuente Camacho

Montserrat Fuente-Camacho (Bilbao, Spain, 1970) currently is a doctoral graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has published in The Deusto Journal, The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and Letras Femeninas. She previously taught Spanish as a second language at the University of Tianjin, China.

Marcus Barbosa

Marcus Barbosa is a doctoral candidate in Modern Languages at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a concentration in Latin American culture and literature. As part of his thesis project, he is currently applying text-mining techniques to studying testimonio literature.