The ThinkND Podcast
The ThinkND Podcast
Women's Work, Part 3: Big Data, Little Women
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Episode Topic: Big Data, Little Women
Some literary scholars are using computer programs to “read” huge collections of texts and draw out patterns. What can these methods tell us about working women’s representation in literature? In this episode, listen in to a conversation with Sabrina Lee, Assistant Professor of English at Calvin University and digital humanist, about women’s fiction as seen through the eyes of digital tools.
Featured Speakers:
- Chris Hedlin, University of Notre Dame
- Sabrina Lee, Calvin University
Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/57d662.
This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Women's Work.
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Introduction to Women's Work Series and Meet Sabrina Lee
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Welcome to Women's Work, a series about the working lives and literary works of U. S. women. In this series, we take up questions like, where did Americans get the idea that some kinds of labor are properly women's work? How is work gendered in women's literature, women's work or works in another sense of the word? How are feminist writers and thinkers recasting what it means to do meaningful work? I am your series host, Chris Hedlund. I teach and help direct the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society at Notre Dame. The program helps students studying both business and the humanities or arts to ask big questions. Questions like, what makes work meaningful? Or what makes a just economy? This ThinkND series women's work is based on an undergraduate course I have developed by the same name. The course and the series are made possible through support of ND Women Connect, ThinkND, the Notre Dame Alumni Association, and a Digital Learning Sprint grant I received from Notre Dame's Office of Digital Learning and their campus partners. If you find the content here interesting, I hope you'll consider interacting with women's work in other ways, such as volunteering to do an informational interview with a student, or participating in our shared read in conjunction with the alumni group Notre Dame Women Connect. You can find more information about these opportunities and others through the ThinkND website. Okay, let's talk about women's work. I am so pleased to be joined today by Sabrina Lee, assistant professor of English at Kelvin University in Michigan, and a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. I've asked Sabrina to join me today to talk about her work in the digital humanities, including a groundbreaking essay that she co authored on the digital humanities and women's representation in fiction, a perfect topic for this series. Sabrina, thank you so much for being here.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350Thank you, Chris. This is just a pleasure to see you and to talk to you today.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Yeah, before I dive into specific questions about your work, I'm going to ask you a few broader questions about the digital humanities as a whole. it's occurring to me as I was thinking through this series, that there were likely listeners who haven't encountered the digital humanities before, that's a brand new concept. and that's really exciting. So I wanted to start on the ground level, audience members, if you are an expert in the digital humanities already, Just fast forward a little bit. Okay, so basics. Sabrina, tell us, what are the digital humanities?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350The digital humanities, is a really capacious field. so there's a lot of things you can do in the digital humanities. The sort of large umbrella, is combining digital technologies with humanistic inquiry. so think of what you can do with a computer and, what questions you have about culture. put them together and that encapsulates a lot of what, happens in the digital humanities. I'm a literary scholar, and so I'm interested in how computer programs can track, patterns in language, patterns across large volumes of texts, for, People who haven't encountered this before, there are free tools online that you can just get started with that might be fun. so the Google Ngram is just one thing that get you hooked. you can just type in search terms and see how language has changed across time. so if you're new to this, and you're curious, dive into the Google Ngram. It's there. It's spelled exactly how it sounds, and you can see, how words change, how phrases change, and their relationships like that.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350if I were to go on Google Ngram viewer and put in something like, thinking about this course, wife, I could see how the usage of that term has changed over time. Is that what you're saying?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350Yeah, I can actually pull it up a minute, and we can actually do this if you wanted.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350I'm 100 percent down.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350what you see right now is what Google has put up, and it's compared three, men, Albert Einstein, Sherlock Holmes, and Frankenstein, and you can see how their usage. from 1800 to 2022 has changed. and right now we talk a lot more about Frankenstein than we do about Albert Einstein, for example. but we could put in something like wife and just, oops, wife, and see how this word's frequency takes a little bit of a dip, which is interesting in
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Oh,
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_1013501980 and so forth.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350interesting.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_1013501922. that's just one thing you can put in other, maybe wife, mother. Let's see what happens.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Oh wow, fascinating. So I'm seeing on the graph that like, something like wife was highest, what is that, 1800 that it starts with? And it's going down over time, but like you said, yeah, 1980s is on the rise. Mother is highest, is it highest now than it ever has been?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350It is.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Since the 1800s?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350Yeah.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350how does Google come up with these graphs? Like How does it go?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350is a tool that's connected to Google Books. You can think of all the books that are digitized through Google. And this is connected to that, and it has basically searched and found these terms. and their frequencies, across that large corpus
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Yeah, interesting. This is a really helpful example, Sabrina. Thanks for thinking to bring this in. So what I hear you saying is that the digital humanities use computer programs in order to read, large collections of texts, beyond what an individual might, if a scholar, say, one of us is a literary scholar, could read, I don't know, a hundred books in a year or something like that. But we're not going to be able to read thousands of books and make the kinds of, conclusions that come from reading such a large collection. So these digital tools do that large collection of reading and is able to show us insights like this, big changes over time. Is that right?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350Yes, that's the digital humanities that I've been most familiar with.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Okay,
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350it's such a broad changing field that, to say that's the only thing that's happening, wouldn't be really fair to other scholars. there's Cool archival projects. there's other scholars are also looking at ways of, different ways of visualizing culture, and stuff. But I have been in the, large, reading large quantities of books sort of field.
Distant Reading vs. Close Reading
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350neat. Very helpful. one of the terms that digital humanists will throw around that I find very interesting is the term distant reading. like distance reading or distant reading as a way to describe their method. can you tell us a little bit about that term? what does that mean, distant reading?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350one of our bread and butter methods is, close reading. and this is a method that has its history, its complex history, but it's what you think of when you think of, your English classes, often. taking, Like a small piece of a text, and looking at all the little fine details, looking for patterns, looking for symbols, looking for imagery, and seeing how those details contribute to the understanding of the novel, or the poem, or the short story as a whole. Distant reading is also looking for patterns, but instead of focusing on like a paragraph, or a poem, or a chapter, it's focusing on a large scale of books and it's looking, for example, like a hundred thousand books. so instead of one paragraph, distant reading is looking for patterns across a large quantity of texts. a large, like something that is very difficult or impossible for a human reader to do without a computer program.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350digital humanists think about the relationship between close reading and distant reading? Is it like, this is the new frontier, we'll do away with close reading, now we've got distant reading. How do digital humanists think about that relationship?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350for me, I And also for my mentor and co author Ted Underwood, distant reading and close reading are different methods, that can be useful in different contexts. and as a literary studies scholar and teacher, I don't want to dismiss the importance and the value of close reading. I teach that, I continue to teach it. it's very useful for certain projects. reading is a different method that's very useful for other projects. and of the big questions are then like, which projects, and when, and all of that. but at least for me, I really want to combine the two, and see what each brings to the table, and maybe the limits of each as well.
Gender Representation in Fiction
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Really helpful. you mentioned there, for me, so maybe that's a good transition to thinking about your specific project that, the essay that you worked on that I'm interested in for the sake of this podcast. Again, this whole series is thinking about women and women's literature, women's work, and, I know that's something several, it's been several years now, but you mentioned Dr. Ted Underwood at UIUC, Dr. David Bannon at UC Berkeley, worked together co authoring an essay, let me see, I think I wrote down the title, The Transformation of Gender in English Language Fiction. Very relevant to this particular series, Transformation of Gender in Fiction. I, We'd love to spend a little time just asking you about that particular piece, if that's okay. so I guess maybe you can start at the broadest level, can you summarize for us a bit? What were some of the key arguments or findings in that essay?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350so This essay was, looking at gender representation, in English language fiction, and looking at it in a couple different, perspectives, One caveat before I get into this, is that we were looking at it, gender, there's many wonderful, important theories of gender as performative, gender as, a structural relationship, we were looking at it, as a public facing category, and so we weren't trying to make any claims about the truth of gender, instead we were thinking about social positions and their legibility. in a public facing, way. so we, there are many genders, besides the binary categorizations of men and women, but for this article we were thinking about the public positions of men and women. so we stayed with this binary. so we were thinking about differences between men's representation both on the library shelves and within fiction. and how it's different from women's representation on the library shelves and within, the space of fiction. So we came up with, three main points and two contrasting patterns. one of the big things we found, was that, gender divisions between characters, between men and women, characters in fiction, became less distinct over the course of the last, 200 years. Another point we found was that female authorship, declined dramatically from 1850 to 1970. this was a story we did not expect to find. and a similar pattern here is that the space allotted to the representation of women, in fiction, so the space that authors use to describe women, also declined dramatically. from 1850 to 1970. So we're, just like your course, thinking about, women's work in a variety of ways. This is thinking about women's representation, both like the real life authors that we have access to. and also women as characters that we encounter when we read.
Research Methodology and Findings
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350I feel, I just find these, three kind of main takeaways from this essay so illuminating, because, like you mentioned, it goes against my own instincts, like my thought would be, like, oh, over time, More women would be writing books, and the representation of women, the amount of space dedicated to representing women in fiction would increase. But in fact, the fact that the opposite is happening is so interesting to me. And then also, though, that then it, there's like kind of a contrasting shift, though, where, the polarization in the descriptions of male and female characters becomes less distinct. The relationship between this, again, I just, I feel like, One of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you is that I just find the, takeaways from this essay, it just changed the way that I think about women's studies. It's fiction and women writers, so it was, yeah, very influential for my own work. before I ask you, I want to ask you more follow up on each of those kind of key takeaways, but a couple of more, general, making sure I understand or helping the audience understand the scope of the study. Do you know how many, books were, you were studying and where did you find those books? Thanks. Bye. Bye.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350read 104, 000 works of fiction. that, that's also important to remember that it's not all the books, but, it's primarily, it's all fiction. from two digital libraries, mostly HathiTrust Digital Library, and also the Chicago Novel Corpus. And those two, sets, those two digital libraries pull mostly from academic libraries, with the exception of, the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. it's important to think also that our data set, it includes mostly work that's housed in academic libraries.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Yeah, very helpful. And then in terms of the years that you were covering, you mentioned 1850 at one point. Was that your starting date or what was
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350date is actually 1703,
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Okay.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350goes through 2009. but most of the works fall within 1780 to 2007.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Okay.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350so overall it's a span of 306 years. but you know the sort of far reaching edges are less represented than 1780 to 2007.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350so this feels like a ginormous undertaking, like a hundred thousand plus books, 300 years. And that's in part, like you said, one of the things that digital humanities can do is to help you take on sizes of projects that would be impossible if you were just an individual researcher, close reading. can you tell us a little bit about like the roles? So what were you doing? What was Ted Underwood doing? What, what would each person do?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350Yeah, that's a great question. so I came onto this project after, Ted and David had developed, the program that we used. they share all of this code, so anybody who's interested in, replicating this, there are repositories where they share everything, and anybody who's interested can, run it and do this sort of work. So they had developed the program called BookNLP, with Noah Smith. And they published this in a 2014 article. you can think several years before this article was published, they were working on it. with this computer program to read this amount of texts. and then I came in on the project after they had found their initial, findings about the decline of representation of women authors and characters. so I wasn't part of the coding. I am not a coder. yet, I am on this project because I was doing a lot of the work of making sure that our data set was. careful in the ways we were using that there weren't glaring holes, that we needed to address. and so even though it's a digital humanities project, my work was really analog, very library research, very physical library research. and I think that's an important part of this story. In our article, there's like tons of graphs, In order to make sure we were being as careful as we had to be, Ted and David were working on the code, making sure the code didn't have bugs, making sure things were clean and careful on, on that end. I was going into libraries and trying to figure out if we were missing like a whole population of women writers that wasn't represented in our data set.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350It reminds me of what you started talking about with the relationship between distant reading and close reading. Or yeah, the computer gets you so far, and then that interaction with the human who's checking. What were, can you give an example? Can you think of something? Did you find any holes? Were there things that you
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350So where are these women's voices? and so it was like searching the silence. and way that we suspected that there might be a hole was in the representation of genre fiction in these, digital libraries. we know that they're academic libraries, housing these books. and so we were like, what about romances? What about westerns? Are these genres? did librarians buy these genres? or are they missing? And for example, like maybe librarians bought. Way more westerns than they did romances. And is that a space where we can be like, the data set is showing that there's this whole not actually, a huge loss of women writers. and so went in to, the library at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, found all these dusty books, found, all these, collections of reviews that, librarians on what they should buy, and cross checked to see, how many romances, are represented in how many westerns are. and, It was just over 50 percent of our sample of romance authors that was represented in Hathi, so 56%. And then it was just under 50 percent of the Westerns that was represented. I think it was about 46%. So actually, librarians were buying more romances and so this confirmed, this was one of the ways we were trying to be careful. And it confirmed that. This is indeed a pattern and there is still this silence that we've noticed and don't fully know how to explain. and this that I've just told you, none of this is in the article. it was weeks of work. it was hours poring over these heavy books, through, Kirkus Reviews, The review that I was spending a lot of time with, Virginia Kirkus, what was, worth buying and whatnot. And all of her judgments were really fascinating. She has sections called problematical books. and then she has, she'll call some of the romances like rental tripe. so not worth buying, for librarians, but something that like, Authors or readers should get at the bookstore, like rent, rent them out. so yeah, all of that, I think that's maybe another silence. when you put together an article, there's all this work that people put in to make sure it's careful and it's necessary and it's important. And this didn't change our findings. And so didn't need to write about it.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Interesting.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350Even though we need to do it.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350yeah, it's interesting hearing you describe it, like all of the making sure that you can't just explain away the findings as an error in the method, but rather it sounds like you've found that through this careful, diligent work, in fact, what the computer program is suggesting to you, that it's possible. is what reflects the actual reality of fiction being published, of women being represented. Did you, what were your hypotheses then? It sounds like, it doesn't have an easy answer to just explain these declines in female authorship over time, declines in representation of women characters over time. Do you have, did you hypothesize as part of the study or just on your own, like the reason for these changes?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350we didn't hypothesize on our own. there's good scholarship out there by non digital humanists that we have relied on to forward some hypotheses. it's in the article, but one of the hypotheses is that As the novel becomes more prestigious over the course of the 19th and then the 20th century, men start gentrifying, in a sense, that genre. in the early, 1800s, it was, a women's genre. By, say, the 1920s, been a masculinization of the novel, related to its, cultural prestige. so there's that story of, a relationship between masculinization, of fiction and high culture. another, and this is another sort of, sobering, hypothesis is that the reviewers, were pushing women out. and there's, more and more difficulty for women to, get published and to, have their books bought and sold. a more hopeful hypothesis is that, the, opportunities for women opened up after, like first wave feminism, and so women, had other avenues of, intellectual, work. and you can see this actually, their relationship to non fiction, for example, is a different story. women are publishing more and more in non fiction. and so, it's possible that women, just had other opportunities that they took elsewhere and stopped writing as much fiction, because they had other chances to do other work. so we don't come to any hard and fast conclusions. I think instead it's useful to go look and see what other scholars have, been finding in review magazines, in, other, things. Studies of like social change and progress.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350I can imagine the three of those theories also potentially overlapping or intersecting. that as writing novels got to be seen as more serious, and so suddenly men are interested in it, like this is a pretty serious thing, but also the goal of making the novel more serious happened in part through a more formal review process, and then you could see how those two things would feed off of each other, for sure. Yeah, I'm going to ask you if it's okay to transition to thinking then about, so we've talked now about, the writers, so thinking about now, you said, within the pages and the fiction itself, you mentioned the gendering divisions between characters, so what do you mean by that? can you give an example of what does that mean?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350So one thing we were interested in was, in the space that authors give to describe a character, we ask a computer program to predict whether a character is, a man or a woman. so we took descriptions of these characters, taught the computer program how to identify men and women and then tested to see if it could identify men and women. So if you think about the descriptions, you can think of the adjectives used to describe a character. You can think of the verbs like the actions a character performs, and you can think of the nouns that a character governs. her house, for example, her room. and the accuracy of prediction decreased, as time went on. And that means that the gender were more stark, because then you could predict, is the character a man or a woman? and then as time went on, they became more blurred. there, there are, We have got a graph, if I can show you. It might
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350That'd be awesome. Um,
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350So you can see here the accuracy declines. and it's, at its height it's only about 75 percent accurate. but across from 1800, it was a lot easier to, predict, to distinguish between men and women then by, say, 2000. Okay, there's some other graphs that are also useful. See, we can think, all these words that are used to describe a character. one of them is what they do. and if you look at, this graph, there's three lines. one is about the word felt, one is about the word got, and one is about the word, read. And, on the graph there's, at the zero line is the median, and men more often are associated with the verb got. are much more often associated with the word felt. And men and women, about equally, in these, books, they read. and, but you converges the further along. it's even more stark, with, the relationship between, space. and this is one of my favorite ones, because it's about interior space versus exterior space. so rooms and chambers in the 1800s are much more associated with women, and houses and country are much more associated with men. By 2000 The pattern kind of converges. so rooms aren't as much associated with women as they used to be. and houses actually are more associated with women than with men. and with room and chamber you can think of the interior domestic space. one question we had that we didn't quite answer is, does house Signify all interior space by 2000. We're not sure about that. But, these graphs help to show like how something that very different between men and women in 1800 isn't, these differences aren't as stark as time goes on. Do you want to see another one?
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Yes. I do want to see another one. and then I want to say silly polyglot from that, too.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350Okay, this one is very fun. It's like words associated with mirth. smile, laugh, and chuckle are gendered within this corpus, especially around 1950.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Huh.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350so at 1950, women, smile and laugh, whereas men, grin and chuckle.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350course they do. That makes perfect sense. Yeah.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350that's when I think is quite fun. in 1950, Chris, we were not supposed to chuckle.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350think is so interesting about this is, we talked in another episode of this. ThinkND series about, the ideology of separate spheres. so thinking about something like houses and chambers versus countries and nations and such. which spaces At least as it has been represented in fiction are seen as belonging to women and belonging to men. And so to be able to see how that changes over time, and I think the gendering of mirth is a good example, too, of how it's not always a linear, relationship. and so it's interesting to just think about. It raises questions that I wouldn't have thought about otherwise. okay, what was happening in the 1950s that would make, The gendering of Mirth is so much starker, How does the post-war period relate to that? How does the, it just raises new questions. I'm sure you found that as you were working on the article too, that you were asking yourself things you hadn't before. Do you see the same changes in terms of the gendering? Is it the same in fiction that's written by women and written by men? was it just as stark in the beginning and just as blurred at the end, depending on the gender of the author?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350We don't have that. one thing we do have, though, is, the presence and the space allotted to women in fiction. it decreases. That's one of our big findings. But it also decreases. in the fiction that women write.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Huh.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350and wasn't just men authors, definitely privileged male characters in terms of the amount of words that they dedicated to these characters. that's, we expected that once we saw the original graph, but it's also fascinating that women authors also don't allot as much time to women characters, as time goes on until about 1970.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Yeah. Do you have a
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350not something you would necessarily think. there's a graph that shows that, if you want to see it.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350feeling?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350it, in books by women, Women characters are, it decreases, from about, 1900 to 1970, as well as in books by men.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Fascinating.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350that's, again, another question. a lot of these graphs, they're fascinating. We've developed them very carefully. they, ask us to ask more questions, than give us, and fast causal answers.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350What would you say, from your perspective, like, why is this?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350main takeaways right now. one, I'm a literary studies scholar, and I think it's, a reminder, that, The relationship between cultural representation and political and social change, does not always match. and for me, it reminds me to be humble and to take care with, the objects of study that I work with. fiction doesn't tell the whole story. if you're going to look at these graphs, we actually can't detect when first wave feminism is, and yet that's so important. and so fiction doesn't tell the whole story, and it's important to be reminded of that. on the other hand, the graphs don't tell the whole story, and and the technologies don't tell the whole story, and so it's important to have, human, the humanistic inquiry, the analog, work too. so basically, We don't know everything, and we have to work together. that's one takeaway. I'm also a gender studies professor, and when I think about, the change of, gender, and how gender categories have changed over time, I think that's a really hopeful story. some of these graphs aren't as hopeful. The decline of the presence of women is not a hopeful change for me. And I think that's important to remember that change can be scary, but it can also be very liberatory. because it means that things don't have to stay the same. and we can work together to change that. I think, I hope so. This article doesn't talk about how to work together, to change that, but that's the importance of courses like yours. and courses in gender and women's studies more broadly, and ethnic studies, these kinds of courses are asking those questions. How do we come together make the world a more just and equitable place?
Hidden Labor and Future Research
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350would you say as you think about, work within the digital humanities, maybe on gender and representation or transformation in fiction, what do you see as areas that are ripe for future research?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350What I'm very interested in, is hidden labor. and, the hidden labor that goes into, you can see my, my relationship to this project. there was a lot of,
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Yeah.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350hidden labor, as we were also looking for, through silences and, looking in holes and data sets and things like that. and so I think that's what I would be very interested in seeing is more work on, What gets hidden, why it gets hidden, who benefits, when it's necessary, when it's perhaps not. and, in a class on women's work, you're thinking a lot about what's visible and invisible. and those are questions I'm really interested in, both within the digital humanities, but also, in other projects.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Me too. Yeah. You mentioned at one point, as you were showing me one of the graphs, ooh, this was one of my favorites. What were some of your other favorite parts, or what was most interesting to you as you were doing the work?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350So I love Looking for traces of what humans have done. And these, reviews that were telling librarians what to purchase, sometimes you would find, little, pencil marks, of, what the librarians wanted to buy. And so one of them was actually from the Gary Public Library That somehow got bought, or ended up at the University of Illinois, and you can see the initials of the librarians, picking out which romances they wanted to buy. And, I just love that. I love, seeing traces of humanity, seeing where people have, left their mark, even if it's small. and that's something I would never have found if I wasn't on this project. looking, and all the other work that women do behind the scenes, the reviewing, I specialize in modernism, so there's a lot of women who are working on the publishing and editorial end, and so finding those other spaces of literary production women are contributing, even if they don't have books that end up in these digital libraries.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350It's a really good example of that, relationship between visible and invisible, and who shows up, and that you seeing those handwritings is like helping a person who might not show up otherwise in the record, show up. It's meaningful to me to hear you describe paying attention to that kind of thing. is there anything that hasn't come up yet in our conversation that was on your radar coming in that you'd like to say?
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350I, looked through your syllabus, and it's a beautiful syllabus.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Thank you.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350I have not encountered that with my work, like my scholarly work right now. It's not what I'm working on. But I have encountered it as a teacher, and thinking about, and you say this really well about, using these tools to, enhance your thinking rather than replace your thinking. and I was thinking about that as I was preparing for this, how we had to combine all sorts of different methods and roles to put this article together. and I think that sort of story of this process. It illustrates, how these graphs and these programs, and being able to read, 100, 000 books, ask us to enhance our thinking, ask us to ask more questions, and prompt, inquiry that way. so yeah, I, I hope that this gives a little bit of, at least one anecdote of transcribing. How this also works in, on a different, in a different space.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up because you don't need to be a digital humanist to be thinking right now about the relationship between digital tools and human thought. I think that's on a lot of people's minds right now with generative AI and certainly students in this space, and teachers, concerns on both sides about what will this mean for us to be thinking about how do we use the tools in ways that are generative just play on words, they're double meaning. Not to replace human thought, but to enrich and to help us think things through. and what you've offered today, I think, is a great example of how digital tools can't operate on their own. It's only as smart as the person who's helping draw out or think carefully outside it.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350Yeah, and it's not a magic wand. I think that's, with people working on code know that it's not a magic wand, right?
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350yeah.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350and then for someone like me, who's on this project, all the analog work also shows how it's not a magic wand and how really it's humans that make it meaningful and, make sure that it's careful and, that's irreplaceable and that's not something, that's one of the values of what you're teaching and how, One of the values of the humanities is being able to ask questions and, combine it with other methods.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350That feels like a really good spot to end. thank you so much, Sabrina, for your insights, for your sharing with us today, your time. and also thank you, listeners, for joining us for this, episode of Women's Work. I Speak for all of us. at Think ND and ND Women Connect when I say that. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Hope you'll visit, think.nd.edu to learn more about this series, about the Women's work course and other opportunities for learning that might interest you. Until next time, inspire your mind and spark conversations.
sabrina-lee--she-her-_1_01-09-2025_101350Thanks so much Chris, this was really great.
chris-hedlin_1_01-09-2025_111350Thank you, Sabrina.