Using Digital Tools to Not-Read Gertrude Stein’s "The Making of Americans"

The difficulties engendered by the complicated patterns of repetition in Gertrude Stein’s 900-page novel The Making of Americans make it almost impossible to read this modernist tome in a traditional, linear manner as any page (most are startlingly similar) will show. However, by visualizing certain of its patterns–by looking at the text “from a distance”–through textual analytics and visualizations, one can read the novel in ways formerly impossible and re-evaluate whether there is or is not “a there there.” This talk will focus on how various analytic methods (such as text mining and frequent pattern recognition) and visualization tools (such as FeatureLens and Spotfire) under research in the MONK project have been used to achieve a new *non*-reading of the text which Stein called her “masterpiece” and critiques called “linguistic murder.”