I will start with the latter point. Reading my colleagues’ posts, I was struck by the rich and insightful metaphors they use to conceptualize our project and our approach to it. FLA director Peter Mallios compares us to seafaring explorers, while editorial board member Jennifer Wellman relates us to storytellers. Both of these comparisons connote imaginative expanses: in tales of exploration, discoveries are not just registered matter-of-factly, but rather with awe and emotion. There is a sense of play in data collection – while we have targeted texts in mind, it is often helpful to both wander in and wonder at the marvels of information out there. Indeed, while scanning materials recently, I found it interesting to stop thinking mechanically – to focus less on the list of articles to scan – and to instead think like Jennifer’s storyteller, to consider the stories being told in these publications and how I might convey them. Storytelling is filled with, and even relies on, emotional resonance. Our archive can detail and present emotional arcs, and as we assemble the story of our archive, we encourage others to find their own arcs and to feel that same awe of exploration.

Of course, the documents that we collect are not devoid of emotion – in fact, they are often based on emotion, as reception of authors is inherently emotionally fraught. This is not just the presentation of cold facts – this is the presentation of feelings, of emotions, that definitively affect an article’s audience. This archive helps us navigate those emotions and critically think about their deployment. What reception trends do we note? What responses are outliers? Why do certain reviewers and certain publications skew a certain way? What are potential political motivations behind certain responses? How do these publications influence their audiences at the time and how do we read them now? These questions and more hinge on and influence affective responses, and archiving them opens up new avenues for considering individual subjective responses and public feelings toward certain authors.

One of the most interesting and difficult aspects of this project is describing and concretely defining these emotions in sentiment analysis. While annotating the documents, the Foreign Literatures in America (FLA) team had to come up with questions to succinctly evaluate the article writers’ opinions, questions phrased so that they would yield uniform responses from a variety of readers. Turning subjective response into objectively categorized data is obviously a difficult undertaking, and it has required much fine-tuning and testing. However, one of the potential outcomes to this rigorous categorization and testing is that, given enough data collection over time, computers can pick up on repeated patterns and analyze sentiment. This idea of training a machine to pick up on subjective, even emotional, cues has vast potential, and I look forward to participating in this process.

Katherine Stanutz is a second year PhD student in English at the University of Maryland. She is an Executive Editor at the Foreign Literatures in America project.

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