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Mining Obscenity III: Failure, with Visualizations

January 26, 2010 in Digital Humanities, literature, obscenity | 7 comments

So, lately I’ve been writing about my interest in the changing semantics of the word bitch, trying to pin down when it went from a term meaning primarily “female dog” to being primarily an obscenity. I still don’t have a good answer. In this post I’ll try to explain why.

Along the way I’ll talk about:

That might seem like a lot of stuff, especially if you’re the poor soul reading this; those links above can hopefully get you where you might be interested in going (and of course, there are more entertaining places on the internet anyway you know).

I need to make very clear here though that, despite all that follows, there is nothing even approaching an answer to the question with which I began in what follows. I will share a sort of dummy visualization of the changing semantics of “bitch,” but it is worthless as an answer to the question with which I started—G.I.G.O..

Last time on “Mining Obscenity”. . .

So, as I’ve written about before, I became interested in tracing the changing definitions of the word “bitch,” of trying to get some idea about when the shift occurred from bitch being used in print to mean “a female dog” (and, I learned, sometimes other animals) to its being a (mildly) obscene obloquy. (This is, of course, just one change in the term’s meanings—more recently, for instance, one could chart the way the term comes increasingly to be used by men to emasculate other men.)

But I think (and hope) the general premise is clear enough: to provide some sense about when, historically, the obscene/derogatory meaning took precedence over “female dog”, at least as reflected in print (which itself raises questions about how one gets a historically valid sample, et cetera, et cetera).


Exploring Project Gutenberg

So one source of textual data is Project Gutenberg. The amount of data ready to hand at Gutenberg, as well as its availability in vanilla plaintext, has made it attractive to folks doing stylometric analyses. And the very kind folks at Gutenberg have even included a very helpful way of getting all their ebooks. (Zipped up, that is something like 14.5 gigabytes according to the PG website).

Project Gutenberg also makes available its catalog data in one big RDF file. As a preliminary step I decided to start with this catalog file just to get some sense of the distribution of texts in the Gutenberg archive. So, using Python to extract data from the RDF and Processing to visualize it, I produced this picture of the distribution of texts.

Graph of Authors in Project Gutenberg

Authors in Project Gutenberg

Each gray horizontal line represents the lifespan of an author who has at least one work in the Project Gutenberg archive. Authors with more than 50 works in the archive get more than a line—they get a box with their name in it. These “major authors” are then color coded: authors with more than 150 works in PG get a red box; authors with between 100 and 150 get a blue box; and authors with more than 50, but less than 100, get a green box. The lines are stacked (using a very crude algorithm; “major authors” aren’t stacked the same way—they’re just chucked at some height), so that the height of the stacked lines gives some insight into the number of authors writing at a certain period.

It isn’t especially pretty (and some boxes are less visible because they have been drawn over), mostly because my programming ability is pretty limited. But it offers some insight into the historical distribution of PG’s authors. There are a lot of authors in the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, because the novel (with the predictable exception of Shakespeare) dominates PG’s holdings. (I’ve focused on the period from 1500 – 2000 here; PG includes some works in the period before 1500—some translations of the classics, some Li Po, some Confucius, and so on, but not too many by comparison).

But there are still lots of problems. If you were paying attention you’ll note that I said that authors with more than 150 works in PG get a red box, which would seem to suggest that Shakespeare was even more prolific than you remembered. This inflated number is because PG’s Shakespeare holdings include a number of different versions of each of Shakespeare’s plays, translations of some of them, as well as a version of The Complete Works. So what gets tallied up as a “work” is not really a work. (Of course what exactly defines “a work” —how we define its unity and its singularity—is just one more of those thorny questions that I’m trying to shunt aside to get some heuristic peek into literary history.)

This is (I hope) somewhat interesting, at least as a glimpse into PG. But if you’ve been paying attention you should be asking—by now you’re probably screaming in frustration—why are you visualizing the lifetimes of authors rather than publication dates of individual works? Well, that is simple. PG’s catalog data does not include publication date in its catalog data. (For that matter, it doesn’t include any data about what edition a particular etext represents at all).

Well, that’s certainly a problem.


But what if we just ignored all that: Visualizing the Semantics of Bitch (with Bad Data)

Okay, so that’s a problem. But let’s say we ignored this problem and tried to forge ahead anyway. Maybe you could take Gutenberg’s textual data and get metadata about the works from some other source. Great idea! But this solution proved more difficult than I could easily manage.

Well you could always just make the data up. Let’s just take each author’s birth year, add it to the year in which s/he dies, and divide by 2, effectively assuming that each author produced all of their work in one great burst of creativity midway on life’s journey.

This would be an assumption so ugly as to call any resulting visualization severely into question, as least in terms of its philological accuracy. But as proof-of-concept, I decided to make the assumption anyway.

So, after waiting for the massive 15 gig-ish download of PG’s etexts, how would one proceed? Well, I imagine that there are other ways to approach this, perhaps better ways, but I used used rgrep to search all the files for instances of the (case insensitive) string “bitch.” Using arguments you can have rgrep return a line on either side of the occurrence of the searched for term. The results will look something like this:

./etext97/itwls10.txt-4218-of the stag; but, partaking more of the nature of the domestic than
./etext97/itwls10.txt:4219:of the wild animal, it remained with the herd of cattle.  A bitch
./etext97/itwls10.txt-4220-also was pregnant by a monkey, and produced a litter of whelps
--
./etext05/8cptm10.txt-62244-"Yes; yes, by the stitching 'tis plain to be seen
./etext05/8cptm10.txt:62245:"It was made by that Bourbonite bitch, VICTORINE!"
./etext05/8cptm10.txt-62246-What a word for a hero!--but heroes _will_ err,

Above are two results from such a search, the middle line of each contains the searched for term. At the beginning of each line is the file in which the grepped-for term occurs, followed by the line number, and then a line of text. Pipe all those results into a text file and you have the raw material you need. The file info (by way of etext number) can connect the text to its entry in the RDF catalog (and thence to the author, title, and birth/death date info).

Determining the meaning of “bitch” in these passages though is not an easy task. One can imagine a machine learning solution—but on such small samples it seems unlikely to work well and would introduce a whole other level of complexity. You could try simply searching for selected key terms within a certain proximity of the occurrence “bitch” (like “dog” or “litter”) and come to a conclusion based on the result. But since the number of results was relatively low (around 400 results), I thought it would be easier and better to just do it manually. To ease the task I wrote a quick Python script to display each extract and accept as input a number (0 – 4) to classify the term. Here is what it looked like:

There are certainly other ways to break up the meanings, but after surveying the data this seemed sufficient. With this scheme, one could skip an entry if it was a false positive (for example, the name Bitchov or similar—there were actually a couple of these). I ranked “son-of-bitch” separately only because it occurred so frequently that it might be worth keeping an eye on it (as a specialized instance of the range of the term’s obscene meaning); and I left open the possibility of ranking a term as “ambiguous” since, even with 3 lines of context, the term’s meaning might not be obvious. (By keeping ambiguous results separate from false positives, “0″, one could go back and grab more context to resolve the ambiguity).

So, for a couple days I left this simple program running. Whenever I had a few free minutes to do some simple classifying while talking on the phone or waiting for water to boil, I classified some occurrences of the term “bitch.” Once all of them had been classified and the output written to a file, it was time to return to Processing to try to visualize this. After some futzing around, here is what all that bitch data looked like.

Visualization of the Relative Obscenity of "Bitch"

Let me first reiterate that this visualization does not really show anything—that the data it represents is fundamentally flawed. As I noted above, because date of publication was not easily available, the dates used here are effectively inventions. (They are accurate within a tolerance of, say, half three score and ten.) Moreover, even with all that text downloaded from Gutenberg, we still have a pretty small number of points to draw any conclusions from. (You’ll note that, for purposes of visualization, I’ve grouped occurrences by the decade in which they occur, fudging the dates still further). And, as if that weren’t enough, let’s recall that the same “work” can appear more than once in PG leading to double-counting. (I went through the data by hand to try to remove these, but I could have missed some).

So, this sure seems like a long blog post for a useless visualization, isn’t it?

Well, here is what I like: this visualization divides the two meanings of bitch horizontally—points appearing below the center, horizontal line represent instances of the term being used in its obscene sense (the color-code gives some further insight into how these break down using the 4-part division discussed above), points above the line represent instances where the term is used in a non-obscene way (to mean “female dog”). This is simple, but has the advantage of allowing that both meanings might be equally available, or available in some mixed proportion, at any historical moment. With a larger data set, and with correct publication dates, this seems to me to be a elegant way of answering the admittedly amorphous question with which I began (though I’m certainly open to criticism of this entire approach).

It could also be improved upon. You could keep in memory the text samples from which these points were derived so that one could mouse-over each point and get data about what author/work that point represents, a keyword in context sort of view, and even a link to the full-text.

With a sufficiently complete data set, I would expect expect that we’d see that, during the twentieth century, the occurrences of the term as obscene would greatly increase while the occurrences of the term as meaning “female dog” would decrease. Exactly where the obscene meanings takes precedence would be the interesting thing to know. (Indeed, it is the thing I was interested in originally.)


A Final Thought

While I want to stress once again that this exercise in digital philological visualization (does that sound suitably buzzword-worthy to win me a prize of some sort?) fails, it fails because the data is not readily available; to get a meaningful result would require more, and better, data than is available from PG at present. (I’ll be putting this little toy problem on the back burner now, but would be interested in exploring other sources of data—Google Books is the obvious choice, but after spending some time playing with the Books API, I’m not sure the necessary data is currently available [nor am I confident that such a use is even permissible within the terms of use]) .

If you will grant that ferreting out the historical contours of the changing uses of the term “bitch” is worthwhile (and maybe it isn’t; perhaps this whole post reeks of sheer pedantry), a visualization like this one seems to illustrate that change (or at least one aspect of). And if you’ll grant all that, there is a final point worth making. This sort of visualization answers the question posed simply and without oversimplification, but it is tailor made to this particular problem. This recalls something I recently read on the Humanist discussion list in a message by Richard Lewis. He wrote:

…I’m increasingly of the opinion that end user application style software is not really what scholars who are serious about exploring the possibilities of using technology to enhance their research or open new avenues of research require. Rather, I’m beginning to feel that a good grounding in programming, a simple, expressive language, and good provision of libraries for abstracting over data encodings and difficult algorithms required in each discipline will be much more conducive to interesting computational scholarship.

The things that make computational scholarship interesting can’t, I think, be packaged up in an end user application. Like scholarship conducted in any paradigm, computational scholarship is interesting and worthwhile when it’s exploratory. But the restrictions of an end user application seriously stiffle any possibility for exploration.

Such a statement has the potential to stir up a debate I’ve seen elsewhere about whether “Digital Humanists” should learn to program, which I have no interest in doing. Nevertheless, at least for tasks like the one I’ve (painfully) described here, I think the perspective Lewis describes is helpful. Insofar as I even made half a stab at solving this little riddle, it is because of the availability of a set of tools that are easy enough to be picked up by a nonspecialist, but supple enough to be used in unanticipated ways. In particular I would single out Python, the Natural Language Toolkit, and Processing. As has been been noted elsewhere, Python’s simplicity, makes it fun to work with and perfect for these sort of problems. In addition to Python’s native facility with strings, the NLTK makes all sorts of text analysis tasks (frequency counts, etc) very simple (and it is all wonderfully well documented). And Processing does for visualization what the NLTK does for text analysis.

Using them as I have here produces an admittedly heterogeneous solution, cobbled together out of what one can learn on the fly (biggest challenge—figuring out SAX processing to handle PG’s massive RDF catalog file). One could simply do everything I’ve done here using rgrep, Python, and Processing, within a single language: there are graphics libraries for Python, and one could do all the string/data manipulation by way of Processing (perhaps with some help from native Java libraries). But it seems that using a language in a task-specific way provides a helpful midway point between spending too much time trying to learn how to code, and just waiting for the exact right tool to appear (in this case, the obscene-semantics-historical-separator—surely it’s next from Google Labs).

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Mining Obscenity II: Google “Bitch”

November 18, 2009 in Digital Humanities, literature, obscenity | 1 comment

"Well, he made so much fuss that all the other dogs but Hence’s old bitch came in."

Well, he made so much fuss that all the other dogs but Hence’s old bitch came in.—Fur News, 1918

So, continuing from last time, I’m interested in trying to understand exactly what Pound means in his famous description of European civilization as “an old bitch gone in the teeth” in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Comparing the line to one later in the Cantos, I suggested that Pound’s use of the term “bitch” in Mauberley channels some of the term’s obscene force while nevertheless referring primarily to an elderly female canine (and therefore being beyond reproach… or at least beyond threat of censorship).

An interesting theory but how would you prove it? In the next post I’ll begin to try some (slightly) more sophisticated solutions (and I am very open to suggestions, dear reader, so don’t hesitate to offer ‘em below).

So, let’s start simple. Geoffery Hughes’s An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World devotes about two pages to “bitch.” The term, he notes, “has the longest history among animal terms as an insult, extending from the fourteenth century to the present, during which time it has steadily lost force through generalization” (23). Originally it referred to “a promiscuous or sensual woman, a metaphorical extension of the behavior of a bitch in heat” (24). The term begins to be applied to men around 1500. (Hughes doesn’t spend much time breaking down the gender differences in the semantics of contemporary uses of the term.)

But alongside its obscene meaning, and (as Hughes notes) not entirely unrelated to it, “bitch” continues to mean “female dog.” So, to reformulate my original question: Would Pound and his readers have seen “an old bitch gone in the teeth” as obviously and indisputably offensive? Conversely, might they have seen it simply as a description of a dog, with the obscene meanings safely segregated? For that matter—how do we read this line? Is there any reason to assume readers, ninety years ago, would have read it any differently, with any more or less unanimity of reference than is available when we read it?

Hughes’s analysis provides a basic framework, but offers little help on the competing place of the obscene and non-obscene meanings of the term. So let’s try some easy (read: lazy) solutions. Googling “bitch” reveals some interesting things—but all far too contemporary to answer this question (save, perhaps, the wikipedia page for bitch, which draws on Hughes and seem to be quite good). Urban dictionary surveys contemporary uses of “bitch” as a noun and a verb—though it doesn’t do any better than Hughes in addressing the gender disparities in the word’s meanings.

Let’s narrow this down by doing a Google Books search on the phrase “old bitch” (I use the phrase “old bitch,” rather than “bitch,” both to find instances with greater similarity to Pound’s usage, and to reduce the sheer number of results). The results largely corroborate what one would suspect: older uses (in, for example, the materials old enough to be in the public domain) tend to be technical sounding references to canines, while more recent usage is frequently the sexist term of derogation we all know so well.

Here are some of the more interesting examples Google Books offers, listed in ascending chronological order, and offered here provisionally, without any regard to the representativeness of the sample (of which, more below):

  • The Revised and Enlarged, Second Edition of The Courser’s Companion and Breeder’s Guide (1834) by Thomas Thacker gives this advice to the would-be dog breeder: “Most authors agree, that a similarity and maturity of age of sire and dam is requisite, as a general principle, to breed good whelps. Markham and others, however, admit, that ‘to breed with a young dogge and an old bitch, may bring forth an excellent whelp;’ but, on the contrary, it is contended, that when bred from an old dog and a young bitch, the whelps will never be good ones.” [1834, canine]
  • The 1867 Cyclopaedia of Wit and Humor includes a story in which, “there’s no telling who’s constable until the election is over; it will be like the old bitch and the rabbit, nip and tack every jump, and sometimes the bitch a leetle ahead.” [1867, canine]
  • Commentaries on the Law of Marriage and Divorce reports a husband who “habitually called [his wife] an old bitch, a bloody or blasted old bitch, an old bawd, and the like opprobrious name.” [1881, obscene]
  • An article in the May 1884 Journal of the American Medical Association describes a rather horrifying experiment on a dog described as a “Large, fat and old bitch.” (The “experiments” involved anesthetizing dogs and then shooting them with various caliber guns in order to determine the best methods for treating such wounds.) [1884, canine]
  • A 1916 issue of Fur News (!) describes a hunt, noting “The dogs all opened up at once nearly, but one of my dogs left the others . . . Well, he made so much fuss that all the other dogs but Hence’s old bitch came in.” [1916, canine]
  • The 1918 Pacific Reporter (which seems to collect court cases from states along the Pacific coast) includes a reference to a woman who called someone “an old wretch and an old bitch, and said she ought to go to hell” in the court of reporting a case. [1918, obscene]
  • In Noel Coward’s comedy “Fumed Oak,” Henry Gow recalls “My only regret is that I didn’t come to the boil a long time ago, and tell you to your face, Dorrie, what I think of you, what I’ve been thinking of you for years, and this horrid little kid, and that old bitch of a mother of yours,” Mrs Rockett exclaims (shrilly!): “Henry Gow!”; Henry insists, “You heard me, old bitch was what I said and old bitch was what I meant.” [1935, obscene]
  • The narrator of Tennessee Williams’s story “Gift of an Apple” describes an “old woman . . . making herself some suffer. She would eat it alone. Fat elbows planted on either side of the tin plate and her shoulders crouched way over. Wheezing a little. Washing it down with scalding black coffee. . . The old bitch. Oh, well. She would die some day. Some ugly disease like cancer. It might be already started inside her dark flesh. Just as well. A stingly old bitch like that . . . ” (last ellipsis original). [c.1935 , obscene]
  • William Carlos Williams’s “To a Lovely Old Bitch,” a poem addressed to Sappho. [1948, obscene]

All of which is interesting. But the data, particularly in this format, seems too anecdotal. One can used the advanced search features to limit the search to certain dates (although the quality of Google Books’s metadata sure ain’t what it could be).
The breadth of Google Books is both a strength and a weakness. In the results above (admittedly culled from a larger set) we find a poem by W. C. Williams and a play by Noel Coward alongside such oddities as the Cyclopaedia of Wit and Humor or the Pacific Reporter, which collects court decisions of the Pacific states (I think). And while we have access to wonderful publications like Fur News (finally!), it seems dangerous to draw any broad conclusions about linguistic usage from a publication that, I assume, has a very limited readership and addresses niche topic.

What we’d like, I think, is to see how the word “bitch” was being used in a wider context that is roughly historically contemporary with Pound’s Mauberley. Ideally, it would be nice to have, ready-to-hand, every published occurrence of the word “bitch” in 1920 (the year of Mauberley? Depending on the size of this set of references we could then manually inspect it, or further mine it to try to breakdown what percentage of occurrences were primarily obscene in denotation. And, since we’re speaking in ideal terms, wouldn’t it be nice to have every use of of the term in English language poetry from 1890 through 1950, to get some sense of how poetry and obscenity (and references to dogs) interacted.

Well, neither of those “ideal” cases seems tractable at present. But there are some practicable solutions that may shed at least some light on the question. That’s for next time…

Works Cited
Hughes, Geoffery. An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006.

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“For an old bitch”: Mining Obscenity

November 5, 2009 in Digital Humanities, literature, modernism, obscenity

The beginning of Ezra Pound's Canto 42.

The beginning of Ezra Pound's Canto 42.

I’ve been spending time tinkering, using a very basic question as an occasion to play with some digital tools. In this post I’ll introduce the question, and in a few others talk about some of the ways I’ve been trying to answer it. Ultimately I’m interested in mining large amounts of text (I’m thinking mostly novels) from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explore uses of obscenity; but that is a big question and is a long way off yet. So let’s start with a more manageable question.

That question is: How “obscene” is the term “bitch”? How frequently did it appear in print? When? What did it mean?

The more immediate relevance of this question came from reading Ezra Pound. Consider two quotations, both from Pound. First:

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

These lines from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley are quoted frequently as representative of modernist disillusionment after World War I. They nicely encapsulate an anger about the first World War that seems to call into question the value of culture itself. Pound returned to this anger throughout his career. Here are some lines from the beginning of Canto 42, first published in 1937:

‘We ought, I think, to say in civil terms: You be damned’
(Palmerston, to Russell re/Chas. H. Adams)
‘And how this people CAN in this the fifth
et cetera year of the war, leave that old etcetera up
there on that monument!’ H.G. to E.P. 1918

(To quickly explain the references, as best as I understand them: the first line draws on the English response to the American Civil War. Palmerston was the British PM during the Civil War; Charles Francis Adams, son of J.Q. Adams, was Lincoln’s minister to England during the war. [So is Chas. H. Adams a mistake?] Russell is Earl Russell, British Foreign Secretary during the war.

The next lines describe a comment by H.G. Wells to Pound, here referring to a statue of Queen Victoria.)

Here, however, “et cetera” replaces obscenity (“leave that old bitch up / there on that monument” was an earlier version). In the first instance “et cetera” stands in for some intensifying, presumably obscene adjective. In the latter “etcetera”—now with no spaces—stands in for “bitch.”

The use of “et cetera” as a sort of circumulocution is interesting, but not unique. Compare Augustin, from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, who replaces an actual obscene verb with “obscenity”: “I obscenity in the milk of thy tiredness.” In “Typhoon,” Conrad’s sailors replace actual obscene language with “blank”:

His teeth flashed angrily in hsi dirty face. He didn’t mind, he said, the trouble of punching their blanked heads down there, blank his soul, but did the condemned sailors think you could keep steam up in the God-forsaken boilers simply by knocking the blanked stokers about?

Cummings, in the delightful little poem “[my sweet etcetera]“, uses “etcetera” more playfully than Pound, but in an essentially similar way. (Indeed, both Pound and Cummings strategically toy with prohibitions on obscene speech to make a political point about war, but I digress. . .)

So here is the puzzle: in Mauberley, published in 1920, Pound writes “an old bitch” but in the Cantos, published nearly two decades later, (the Fifth Decad of Cantos was first published in 1937), he replaces the word with “etcetera.”

That’s odd, isn’t it? Why would the later text be censored, rather than the earlier one?

One possible explanation is that the second passage is potentially more libellous than the first. While Queen Victoria is not named explicitly, the reference to “that old etcetera up / there on that monument” is clear enough to bring the comment into the domain of libel.

Or perhaps it is because the word is more obscene in the latter than the earlier. For while the same phrase “old bitch” is used in both, it seems to in fact have two different meanings. When, in the Cantos, Pound/Wells refers to “that old etcetera up there on the monument,” the derogatory force of that obscenity is evident. But in Mauberley the word “bitch” is not necessarily used in the obscene sense. The “old bitch / gone in the teeth” for whom a myriad have died is a “botched civilisation” (botch and bitch chiming off another), not a specific (female) figure. And the abstraction of the indefinite article and the reference to “gone in the teeth” seem to make clear that if the tenor of this metaphor is “civilization,” its vehicle is an old female dog.

Today “bitch” is a minor-level obscenity. However offensive some may find it as a piece of sexist insult, its obscene force is not so great that it is prohibited from broadcast television. But it is still definitely impolite. And while the semantic borders of the word seem to be quite flexible, it continues to carry gendered meanings. One can refer to a male as a “bitch” (it was not always the case), but at least part of the derogatory force of so doing comes from the concomitant emasculation.

More could be said about the gendered complexities of contemporary usage of the word “bitch,” as both a noun and a verb. (And what about its short-lived career as an adjective—as in, “That fluorescent t-shirt and acid-wash denim combination is totally bitchin”?). But the primary meaning of the term “bitch” is clearly this derogatory one. To use the word to refer to a female dog is quaint. But for how long has this been so?

Here’s a guess: Pound’s lines from Mauberly capitalize on an ambiguity, drawing on ire of the obscene sense of bitch even while keeping the term printable by clearly attaching it to its older meaning.

Such an argument assumes a basic historical development of the meanings of the word “bitch,” and a parallel, evolving set of standards of print decency; the earlier, primary meaning of bitch as “female dog” at some point takes a back seat, becoming today what I think is almost a “technical” meaning (used, for instance, by dog breeders). And the primary meaning becomes the one we’re all familiar with.

Sound convincing? Well, how would you prove it?

Over the next couple of posts I’d like to use this question as an occasion for thinking about how such a question could be further explored with available digital tools.

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