On the first day of December 1904, the last day of a carefully planned urban utopia brought together people from many different places and backgrounds to experience the world's fair for the last time.[^1] At least two-hundred-thousand people gathered on the grounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition sharing mixed feelings of sadness, wonder, and nostalgia. Some visitors traveled a couple blocks to see the fair and its president David R. Francis for the last time. Others would soon be leaving the United States after seven months of transiting between cultural universes by walking. It was the so-called Francis Day: the grand spectacle of colors, shapes, tastes, and sounds was about to vanish from the city as if it never happened.
-For the last time, fair officials marched from the administration entrance through Skinker Road. After stopping at the Administration building, Francis and other commissioners continued the march towards the Louisiana Monument at the core of the fairgrounds. Behind the monument, separated by the Great Basin, two of the main exhibit buildings, surrounded by thoughtfully designed water ways, contributed to a generalized sense of order.[^2] Francis, Governor Dockery, and other members of the local political elite stood in front of the north side of the monument and addressed the crowd with their closing speeches. Governor Dockery said that the fair's lesson was made evident to every visiting foreigner: that the United States was "the greatest nation in all the world." He also made sure to address the foreign commissioners gathered around the monument to warn them about an ongoing "war of peaceful conquest." Said war, he argued, would prove to every nation in the world the United States' economic and commercial supremacy.[^3]
+For the last time, fair officials marched from the administration entrance through Skinker Road. After stopping at the Administration building, Francis and other commissioners continued the march towards the Louisiana Monument at the core of the fairgrounds. Behind the monument, separated by the Great Basin, two of the main exhibit buildings, surrounded by thoughtfully designed water ways, contributed to a generalized sense of order.[^2] Francis, Governor Dockery, and other members of the local political elite stood in front of the north side of the monument and addressed the crowd with their closing speeches. Governor Dockery said that the fair's lesson was made evident to every visiting foreigner: that the United States was "the greatest nation in all the world." He also made sure to address the foreign commissioners gathered around the monument to warn them about an ongoing "war of peaceful conquest." That war, he argued, would prove to every nation in the world the United States' economic and commercial supremacy.[^3]
The fair ideological message, its perception by cultural commentators, and the cultural representations they generated about it are equally relevant to the understanding of the dynamics of power at play (and on display) at the fair. Even though historians have accessed and examined personal letters, diaries, and other sources that shed light on how visitors experienced the exhibits, close reading of those documents often proved insufficient to assess how audiences reflected upon and discursively represented the language of empire and colonialism embedded on the fairgrounds.[^12] Hence the importance of paying attention to the role of newspapers as a particular kind of audience: by attending to the cultural commentary about the Louisiana Purchase Exposition through the use of “distant reading” methodologies, this article unearths how newspapers represented the geopolitical and cultural identities involved with power dynamics at the fair. It also explores how, from said representations, newspapers contributed to an imagined geography of modernity centered around the American colonialism and exceptional modern identity.
-With a digitally driven argument, this article further contributes to scholarship on world’s fairs as symbolic universes in two ways: first, it demonstrates how methodologies of digital humanities like distant reading, word vector analysis, and named entity recognition can help historians assess how the fairs enabled particular cultural and discursive representations of the the hosting country and the world. Second, it pushes for a closer attention to the role of newspapers as one kind of audience to the fair’s ideological message: one that attends not only to the message, but to dialectical interactions and discursive negotiations between groups on the grounds. Newspapers further relied on the ways in which other audiences perceived and engaged with the language of empire and American colonialism at the fair in order to write their stories and produce complex discursive representations of participating cultures and the modernizing world.
+This article uses digital methodologies to contribute to scholarship on world’s fairs as symbolic universes in two ways: first, it demonstrates how methodologies of digital humanities like distant reading, word vector analysis, and named entity recognition can help historians assess how the fairs enabled particular cultural and discursive representations of the the hosting country and the world. Second, it pushes for a closer attention to the role of newspapers as one kind of audience to the fair’s ideological message: one that attends not only to the message, but to dialectical interactions and discursive negotiations between groups on the grounds. Newspapers further relied on the ways in which other audiences perceived and engaged with the language of empire and American colonialism at the fair in order to write their stories and produce complex discursive representations of participating cultures and the modernizing world.
#### 2. The rhetorical construction of the American Empire @@ -91,10 +91,10 @@ if (!file.exists("word_embeddings/fullcorpus_bngrams.bin")) {model = train_word2 model <- model[-1,] #remove "" (first row) from the model as it seems to be an OCR error ``` -In order to assess how cultural commentators characterized the geopolitical entities that were part of the geography of modernity they helped imagining, this project relies on another methodologies of the digital humanities: word embedding models. According to historian Ben Schmidt, word embedding models are useful to explore relationship between words through spatial analysis while allowing "a much richer exploration of the vocabularies or discursive spaces implied by massive collections of texts [...]."[^50] Although not extensively accurate nor ideal for relatively small corpora, the word vector analysis has proved significant for this project as it reinforced how local newspapers relied on particular notions of empire, race, and civilization -- even if unintentionally -- to produce discursive representations of the geopolitical entities and their modern collective identities. For instance, observe the preliminary list of words that have a significant score of similarity to the words "savage" and "progress" below:
+In order to assess how cultural commentators characterized the geopolitical entities that were part of the geography of modernity they helped imagining, this project relies on another methodology of the digital humanities: word embedding models. According to historian Ben Schmidt, word embedding models are useful to explore relationship between words through spatial analysis while allowing "a much richer exploration of the vocabularies or discursive spaces implied by massive collections of texts [...]."[^50] Although not extensively accurate nor ideal for relatively small corpora, the word vector analysis has proved significant for this project as it reinforced how local newspapers relied on particular notions of empire, race, and civilization -- even if unintentionally -- to produce discursive representations of the geopolitical entities and their modern collective identities. For instance, observe the preliminary list of words that have a significant score of similarity to the words "savage" and "progress" below:
```{r} -model %>% closest_to("savage", 20) +model %>% closest_to("savage", 30) ``` ```{r} diff --git a/Views-of-an-Empire.html b/Views-of-an-Empire.html index b8af820..af1e704 100644 --- a/Views-of-an-Empire.html +++ b/Views-of-an-Empire.html @@ -11,9 +11,9 @@ - + -