Transcript
Marshall Poe:
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe, and you're listening to an episode in Grinnell College's Authors and Artists podcast. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and today I'm very happy to say we'll be talking with Elizabeth Rodrigues about her book, Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narratives as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature, and it's just out today from the University of Michigan Press. Liz, welcome to the show.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Hi. Thank you for having me, Marshall.
Marshall Poe:
Absolutely, my pleasure. Could you kick us off by telling us a little bit about yourself, what you do at Grinnell College and how you got there?
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah. It is a little bit of a long story, but I like to tell it, because maybe it's slightly unusual story for an academic career path. I did my undergraduate degree in English with emphases in creative writing and Greek as a minor. Then, was just in a period of discernment about where I was going to take that and knowing that I wanted to be involved in education in some way, it's a confluence of events, I discovered academic librarianship and was able to pursue my Master's of Library and Information Science at University of South Florida, where I was living in Florida at the time. Then, when I finished that degree, I was on the job market and looking around. There was a one-year job open at Grinnell College Libraries for a humanities reference librarian, and so with my Master's and my undergraduate background, I thought, "Well, I might be a good fit for this."
I also went to a small liberal arts college, and so was very much on board with the idea of having my first job be at Grinnell. I was fortunate to get that position, and so I spent my first year as a librarian here 2008, 2009 at Grinnell College as a term humanities and reference librarian replacing Rebecca Stewart, who was on sabbatical that year. I mentioned 2008, 2009 because that was also the era of the birth of this major library resource and initiative called the Hathi Trust, which is a copy of every scanned book that Google has scanned for Google Books. Part of the arrangement in the creation of Google Books, universities are allowing their collections to be scanned, major research universities that have huge collections said, "We will allow books to be scanned, but we want a copy of every scan," and that's what Hathi Trust has come to curate and make as freely available as possible within the status of copyright law.
I mentioned this because it's kind of my entry into librarianship paralleled the birth of this really vast database of library book collections and in the process ... Oh, I should also mention one other thread here. 2008 was the year that Barack Obama was elected as president and Nate Silver became this guru of data-driven predictions. This was the first time in my awareness that the terms big data and this reverence around this idea of we have this new set of information called big data, and if we apply the right tools, we will be able to predict the future much more accurately and reassuringly in certain cases.
Just that confluence of people starting to talk about data as a mode of knowledge creation that was going to exceed everything that I had been taught could come through human interpretation with the same time is having this, on the library side, having this huge collection of library information become available and just a quick doing a keyword search in Hathi Trust will very quickly make you realize that the thing that you are looking for is just one tiny small sliver of a huge body of printed literature.
The confluence of this idea that if we collect enough data, it will narrate itself with much deeper professional immersion. If we said we wanted all the data of literature and publication, if we wanted all that data, what would it actually feel like to have that data? It feels like any prediction or single narrative is just dwarfed by the presence of that data. That really stuck in my mind as I went on to pursue my PhD in English. As I was working through that path, after that one-year job, I decided to pursue the PhD in English and in the process of discovering what my work as a doctoral student was going to be, I realized I couldn't quite shake that displacement, that being involved in a much larger data universe had presented me with.
That was always there and I kept always thinking, how does this affect how we study literature? How does it affect how we understand literature? As my interest developed, I realized I was very interested in early 20th century, late 19th century US literatures associated with what has broadly been referred to as the Modernist period. Modernism is sometimes much more associated with British literature, but there's also obviously a huge US American context for it as well, and that's where I really started to narrow in and I started seeing all these little hints that this way of thinking about data not as something that was going to provide narrative, but as something that was going to overwhelm and challenge and, in some ways, really productively change our conception of narrative, that was already present well before the advent of mechanical computation.
I really think that my background in libraries informed the genesis of that book project and the completion of my doctoral degree in realizing that, as a librarian, we say we're generalists, we all have many intellectual passions and that my best fit was going to be in a library setting that was thinking about how we use digital tools to create knowledge at the same time as being able to teach what goes into those tools, not just how to use them, but why they work, how they work, what the history is of being able to publish ideas and understand the world and the way that we do. Lo and behold, in just a very strange twist of fate, I went from my PhD to my, I did a postdoc with the Council of Library and Information Resources at Temple University in their, at that time, brand new digital scholarship center, which is now the Loretta Duckworth Scholars Studio in their brand new library. As I was in that postdoc, a position became available at Grinnell College again, but this time in a full-time, yeah.
Marshall Poe:
You must have made a good impression during your one year.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
I like to think so.
Marshall Poe:
Yes.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
I like to think so, because you have to assume so, because you realize when you're reapplying for a job you've already had, that's all you've got, really.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Almost doesn't matter much the rest of the materials. It was a couple iterations later of the same job that I had had in the one-year version, but now re-imagined as Humanities and Digital Scholarship Librarian. I'm one example of a person who has a job that didn't exist when I went to school for it, and I could not really have predicted that that particular job would become available at that particular time. Since I'd been at Grinnell College, I knew that it's really an environment that doesn't try to make people fit into jobs, it builds jobs around people, so I knew it was a place where the librarians were highly collaborative and also highly, very involved in their scholarly research agendas. I knew that it would be a place where I could continue to work on both academic research, as well as teaching, as well as being part of this exciting, powerful, collaborative endeavor of being a library, of trying to steward the resources and provide access to the resources that people need to make discoveries. Yeah, that's what I do here.
Marshall Poe:
That's a cool story, I've got to say. That is a very cool story, and I should give a shoutout or at least acknowledge my debt to Burling Library at Grinnell College, where I'm thinking you're sitting right now, is that correct?
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
I am, yep.
Marshall Poe:
Yes. I can't tell you how many thousands of hours I spent there and I remember the librarians. Christopher McKee was a librarian when I was there. He had a research agenda too. He studied 18th century British Navy, I think. This was modeled for me very early on. Also, what you say about the kind of transformation scholarship is something that I think the listeners would be interested. I'm 60, and when I wrote my first books, they were all in libraries and I spent all my time in libraries. The last book I wrote, I went to a library a couple of times. Of course, I used all the library databases to get all the books and the journal articles, but I was able to do it from the comfort of my home.
But I didn't get to hang out with people at the library, which is what I did at Burling, where I met all of my friends, all the other library rats. Yeah, that's good. It really has changed. Since we've been able to get inside the books, so to say, to do string searches inside books, it really has transformed scholarship. You can really find connections that you never ever would've found or at least that great. You would be at great pains to make the connections.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah, it would be one or two very, yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. With algorithmic searches, you can really do amazing stuff. You can see things that you would not have been able to see, and I know this is true in my own scholarship. It's an exciting time to be a librarian.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Agreed.
Marshall Poe:
People don't think about that, but it's a really exciting time to be a librarian. Just even to, this is tangential, but the New Books Network, we've published 14,000 interviews with academic authors and they're not in libraries now. There are no Mark records for our interviews, but they are of scholarly value, and so I've talked to librarians about, how would we somehow integrate these into the databases that the Mark record, whatever the records are called now, are they so called Mark records?
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
There are still Mark records, yes.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, okay. Anyway, I can't, but yeah. How do we integrate this? Is there an algorithmic way to do it that would involve zillions of person hours? This is something that they should be represented in academic collections, because they're, in a hundred years, people want to come back to your interview.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Probably take them less time than reading the book, so yeah.
Marshall Poe:
They don't want to do that, and so they should somehow be represented in academic libraries, but how to do this, we haven't figured out yet. Anyway, that's enough about the New Books Network and computers. Can you tell me why you wrote Collecting Lives and what you were hoping to accomplish with the book?
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah. The number one thing I wanted to accomplish is, I wanted to change how people think about the relationship between data and narrative. Because having experienced it in my own life, like this disjunction between this sense floating around culturally that data would reveal. If we just collect enough data, it will reveal a truth that we don't need to agree on, it will just be true. Then, having actually gotten closer to working with bigger data, both through the Hathi Trust and through just being involved with managing library resources at scale, you start to see this is a lot of data. Just having seen that, "Oh, actually no, it makes things less clear, not more clear when you actually are having your hands on it." I wanted to provoke that moment of recognition of like, "Oh, data is very different from narrative."
Data is driven by collection. Data gains its value through collecting more of it and ideally collecting all of it. Although that's an ideal, that's never actually reached conceptually that very much drives, I think, how we talk about data. We talk about it as a very exhaustive way of representing reality. Narrative is very much driven by selection. It's driven by taking the most meaningful points and stringing them together in a way that demonstrates causality and, in a very traditional way, causality and some sense of change and closure. I think when you actually are looking at data points, you start to see that there's no self-selecting data point. When you want to change data into something that you can wrap your head around, so something closer to narrative, something closer to meaning, you have to make choices about what you're going to value out of that data collection and select as important points to. Even if you never actually feel like you're making an argument, your selection of certain data points as meaningful becomes an argument. It becomes a kind of narrative.
I wanted people to see that data does not narrate itself and that people have been grappling with this for much longer time than we would call the era of big data. You're a historian, so you know that we all have this very present bias. If it's something big now, it must be brand new now. But actually, people have been grappling with what it means to collect data about human lives for a very long time very meaningfully I found in the late 19th and early 20th century US as questions around race, ethnicity, and gender were at a moment of high public debate, high tension, a lot of policy decisions being made about what will citizenship mean, both for the formerly enslaved and the descendants of the formerly enslaved, as well as this influx of folks from other countries coming to the United States for a whole variety of reasons, some staying, some not, and just thinking about what does it mean to be a US self at this time.
I thought it was very compelling to me to think about both this disjuncture between data and narrative, and also how these writers were grappling with that in the context of US identity. I guess an underlying thread here when I talk about narrative, I'm talking a lot about life narrative, because I think that's one of the most ... it's a very compelling site to me of where the rubber meets the road in terms of both narrative theory and personal identity formation. We're all constantly using narratives to understand ourselves all of the time. As we become more self-aware about the mechanics of narrative, I want that to be able to open up how we think about narrating life stories. I'm looking in particular at this early late 19th and early 20th century period of writers who did both, who both collected data and also engaged in some type of autobiographical writing. I just find that that's a really interesting spot because you could say that, in some ways, a life could be imagined as a data collection, and it's often imagined as a story. What happens when those two things bump against each other?
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm, very well-put. Let me read a wonderful sentence from your book that I think encapsulates some of what you just said a little bit more maybe. This book examines how modernist writers who collected data, or is it data? I don't know.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
I go back and forth. I'm inconsistent in my pronunciation.
Marshall Poe:
Let me start over. This book examines how modernist writers who collected data and narrated lives navigate this space pinpointing an unexplored intersection between the rise of data collection, and that's the part I want to talk about, as a method of knowing the human and modernist experimentation in narrative form. I was thinking about that sentence. It's a great sentence, and I know a little bit about the rise of data collection. Obviously, states and various authorities would collected data forever, but I was thinking about a couple of writers like Henry David Thoreau's "Walden". He collected data and wrote autobiography, but not in the way you're talking about, no. Right?
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah. For every project, there's texts that go unselected-
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, right.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
For one reason or another, yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Right, but his sources were different. Then, I was thinking about a book that I'd read a long time ago, Emile Zola "Germinal", and this book's famous because the guy went and lived with coal miners.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Oh, wow.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. He collected data for that, but this is not the kind of data you're talking about here. This is a systematic collection of data by various governmental and academic institutions, or they might be interest groups that has some probably political or policy purpose. Is that right?
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
I would say that data collection, especially when you're talking about life-writing, it exists on a spectrum and in a spectrum of intentionality, a spectrum of exhaustivity that you're aiming for. When I was thinking about what authors to bring together, I was thinking about writers that both wrote autobiographically, but also had these notable data collection projects that were perhaps literary, but not necessarily, they were somewhat separate from their literary endeavors. In the case of W.B. Du Bois, who is the subject of the first chapter-
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, why don't we, I'm sorry to interrupt. Why don't we start right there and go through these four authors? Du Bois is an interesting case, because I've read a lot of Du Bois, and I got to say, I always thought of him as an early social scientist. Also, his books are a little bit hard to classify because he occasionally drop a poem into one.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
I'm not going to drop any poems into my next monograph, but he did.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
He did, yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah, and I think that's actually-
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, maybe you could talk a little bit about him and how he fits into the narrative that you are constructing.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah. It isn't just the first chapter of the book. It's the first chapter that I wrote of the whole project because his combined life work, he was prolific in every measure. He has a body of sociological work that folks who come at him through the literary studies angle might be less familiar with. The first Du Bois work that I had read was Souls A Black Folk, and was very struck by the same thing that you were.
Marshall Poe:
Dropped the poems.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
We say that book is multi-formal. It's multi-formal, but it also somehow hangs together better than what you'd say, "Oh, this is just a bunch of essays that I wrote and I collected them to put into a book." There's something more than just a collection of essays, there's something that forms a powerful coherence. But through such a diversity of forms, and that's fascinating to me, and if you start to think about how you're framing that work, and it's been framed many different ways by many different, whatever they call it.
Marshall Poe:
It's very hard to classify. It's a very hard to classify book. It's shocking from the modern ... It's a good example of what you find in the book is what you bring to the book, because if you're a social scientist, you're going to say social science, and if you're a literary scholar, you're going to say this is literature.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah, and if you study life-writing, you're going to say, "This is a very experimental autobiography."
Marshall Poe:
You're going to say, "This is a personal heritage," yeah, right, yeah.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah. Just grappling with that and that he's going from this, he ricochets between these very expressive passages. Then, this is even more the case in a later collection called Dark Water: Voices From Behind the Veil, that I discussed in companionship with Souls of Black Folk. He has outright speculative fiction in that second collection, so just going from the observational to the expressive, to the prophetic, there's such a range of tones and approaches that he uses. But the more time I spent with him, the more it seemed to me that he's using all these ranges and tones still to try to grapple with what is this thing called reality? I think this is something that differentiates modernists from postmodernists. I think modernists do still think there is a reality out there, and it may be far broader than traditional ways of understanding it have allowed us to see, but there is still a reality out there and there is a way of talking about it that makes sense.
But I see him trying to grapple with that, but then looking for all these different languages and approaches and social science approaches being one of them. To think more about that, I went back to his major sociological work, The Philadelphia Negro, which predates Souls by a few years. I think it's late 1890s and Souls is 1903. Just digging into that and through that realizing, "Oh, Du Bois had a scholarly life path ahead of him he thought." He was really pursuing the academic credentials that you would associate with somebody who was going to go on and have a professorship at an Ivy League institution. He goes to Harvard, he gets a fellowship to study in Germany with the leading historians of his time.
His doctoral dissertation was phenomenal, his work was outstanding. But he finishes his education and the only job he can get at the time he says is as an adjunct professor and researcher at University of Pennsylvania, specifically because they had commissioned a project to try to understand African-American life in Philadelphia, obviously, from a very white perspective. As Du Bois puts it, they had a theory, and the theory was that African-Americans in Philadelphia were a big problem for Philadelphia as a city, and they needed to be fixed. They were looking for somebody to collect the data to prove that theory, and that's where he takes off and says, "I will collect the data. I will collect as much data as I can possibly get, more different kinds of data than you conceived of when you commissioned this study."
Because he's going well beyond what was considered the data of African-American life by white researchers at the time, which was basically boiled down into poverty rates, mortality rates, crime rates. He collects data, historical data, how African-American life has been constrained by legal policies in Philadelphia over time. He surveys the entire Seventh Ward. Actually, one of my favorite quotations from people that I read in studying Du Bois was from a collection about the Philadelphia Negro, where the writer basically says, "Du Bois does not survey." He tries to go to every single home in the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia to collect information about African-American homes, not picking and choosing, like I'm going to pick two from here and two from here. He tries to go to every single home, and he does it physically himself.
Marshall Poe:
Wow!
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
He doesn't have a research assistant. He's the researcher and the data collector and the data organizer. He says, "Basically, they had a theory and they wanted me to prove it." To avoid that, to avoid reproducing this fixed narrative that had already in placed on the African-American community in Philadelphia, he doesn't refuse to collect data, he doesn't refuse to engage with the empiricist project. He says, "No, you're doing empiricism wrong. I'm going to get all of this data and I'm going to show you how much more complicated it is." Basically, through this data, he's able to show this very heterogeneous African-American community.
No surprise to the African-American community, but a surprise to the white audience who isn't expecting to have time and space devoted not just to those who would be classed as criminals or impoverished, but the working middle class and the upper class and its social structures and to basically say, "The problem here isn't this community. The problem is how this community is met by assumptions about it and legally constrained from employment and real estate ownership." It wasn't quite the outcome they were looking for, but he uses the process of collecting more data to create multiple narratives of African-American life in Philadelphia when his white funders were looking for one specific narrative.
Marshall Poe:
A lot of it's worked because now we have this strong distinction between, I can't remember the word, but essentially survey techniques and ethnography, and he won't have anything to do with that.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
No.
Marshall Poe:
He's like, "No, we're not doing it that way."
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah. Yeah. There's a phenomenal book, Alden Morris', The Scholar Denied that has come out within the last five or six years about Du Bois' career. It came out slightly after I had written this chapter, but when I was looking at that book and reading reviews, it's like everything you thought you knew about Du Bois and sociology is wrong. He founded sociology as a discipline in the United States and Morris makes a very compelling case that Du Bois' work was really ahead of its time in terms of his insistence on multiple methods, his insistence on exhaustive data collection, his insistence on long-term data collection. He proposed a plan to collect data about one aspect of African-American life in the United States each year for 10 years and do that for multiple decades to really have this amazing data set that he was thinking, "We don't need a survey. We need long-term, full scale data."
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, that's cool. It's very cool.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Well, let's jump to the next person you deal with, and I'm surprised to see his name there, Henry Adams. Why Henry Adams?
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Henry Adams, yeah. A couple of reasons why Henry Adams. One, because I never felt like I had fully answered the question of, if you're reading The Education of Henry Adams, which is famously autobiography written in the second person, the recurring theme in that book is that he's trying to tell the story of his own education, but in every single chapter he says, the story had not yet begun, or the story had to start over, or no story could be told. For all of its idiosyncrasies, I find something still very compelling about that sense of, "I wanted to have a life story, but the story keeps stopping and I don't know why. I'm always telling the wrong story about my life, because the next chapter disproves the former chapter." He's narrating this sense of not being able to narrate yourself. I found myself just my brain always wondering, what is this investment in the story he's trying to tell and why is it continually frustrated, and why is that the story he's telling? He's telling the story of not being able to tell one.
As I was thinking about the early privately published versions of, The Education of Henry Adams came out in 1906, so right in that early 20th century moment, what's percolating? The more I was looking into it, the more I realized, "Oh, Adams has the exact opposite relationship to data that Du Bois does in a certain ways where Du Bois needs a fixed narrative to be demolished, or at least to be proven to be not the singular narrative. Du Bois needs the presence of multiple narratives to create space for his own life to exist. For Henry Adams, his singular story was an understatement of the year, an extremely privileged one. One of my favorite moments of the Adams chapter was the moment of, there's a quotation from his ... Oh, now I'm forgetting, sorry, to historians. Is it his grandfather or his great grandfather?
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, it doesn't matter. Go ahead.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
John Quincy Adams, one of his paternal relations, John Quincy Adams, in his diary in 1796 writes, "My studies are indeed all directed to one point, which is pointed out to me by the station that I hold." This is the diary of a young man who feels like I'm on a path and I know where I'm going, and everything I study is preparing me for this one thing. Whereas, Henry Adams writing over a century later is really reflecting on, "I keep learning things right, but they don't add up to anything." I contrast that quotation with another one from The Education, which is, "One began to see that a great many impressions were needed to make a very little education, but how many could be crowded into one day without making any education at all?"
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm, that's good.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
That sense of information overload as an impediment to selfhood and achievement at large, I was just really fascinated by that.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Well, it's an amazing book. It also rings true to, I think, almost anybody of a certain age that is the inability to narrate your own life. I don't know if you've had occasion to look at your own resume or CV. I look at it and I'm like, "That is not the whole story, man."
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Exactly.
Marshall Poe:
That is not even close to the whole story that. In fact, that tells a story that isn't even true.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Mm-hmm, yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Boy, do I have things to say to you.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Absolutely, absolutely. I think we need to re-examine our relationship, or we need to re-examine how we understand the relationship between data and narrative as I talk about in the coda of the book, because so many algorithmic processes of classification and decision-making are becoming integrated into the shaping of our lives in ways we don't really know. As citizens, we need to become more aware of that. But on an individual level, I also think there's a power in realizing that if you imagine life as a data collection, there's no way you can think of it as having one story.
Marshall Poe:
No. No change.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
If you feel that you don't have one story, that's not a flaw.
Marshall Poe:
You're like everybody else.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Exactly.
Marshall Poe:
He wonders why they are where they are right now. It involves so much contingency and luck and striving and suffering and pain and tears, and on a resume or a CV, those things don't show up.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
No. Yeah, exactly. Except for that motif, there was a meme a couple years back about the shadow resume or the shadow CV. There were a few folks online who were publishing this alternate version of their CV with all the awards they didn't get and things, and I thought, "That's a very data-driven way of imagining your life."
Marshall Poe:
Right, yeah. Here's the point in my life where I had a complete mental breakdown and didn't work on anything for a year. You're not going to include that in your CV, even though it happens with everybody.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Even though it happens, and there's probably a record of it out there somewhere.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, there probably is record. Oh, I'm sure that there is. I can tell you in my life, definitely. All right. Let's move on to Gertrude Stein to get another name I was surprised to see.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah. Well, again, you think about ... Oh! Just one more thing about Adams real quick though. The other thing about Adams was, my gateway was through his life-writing, but then he also had this well-established career as a historian and a writer of histories using this method of history he was trying to develop called scientific history. That really was thinking about, "Oh, what if history was a data collection? We could get beyond all of our interpretations of history and get to it." That was another example of someone who wrote this very data-driven life narrative to me, but it had been preceded by work in a empiricist discipline trying to narrate human history or trying to not narrate human history
Marshall Poe:
Every historian runs up against this. It's frustrating, because you do want to say that your work is, the Germans would say, [foreign language 00:35:59], kind of scientific, it's not quite the right translation, but then you realize what you're putting in and what you're leaving out, and you're like, "Oh!"
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah. Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. The stuff that's left on the cutting room floor that it's with you your whole life, you're always thinking about it.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Anyway, let's move on to Stein, Gertrude Stein.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah, so Stein, yeah. There's been just a wonderful vein of work about Stein that really digs into her scientific background. Prior to being known as a literary figure, she was a very serious student of science. She was a student of William James as an undergraduate studying psychology, which James practiced as an empiricist discipline, although a slightly different form of empiricism than we might associate with psychology now, and then went to medical school, where she also continued to work as a researcher and was doing research around brain anatomy. At that time, the process of doing brain anatomical work was having a cadaver brain of some kind and slicing it very, very thinly to put it on a plate and then drawing it. This, again, very physical embodied process of data collection, but with this goal of exhaustivity of being able to see the whole brain.
Knowing that, but also being very curious about her later literary aesthetic, which I think is pushing towards a kind of exhaustive representation, so much of what makes her work distinctive, especially in the earlier period that I'm looking at. I focus on three lives, her breakout collection of these life stories that are very experimentally-written, and then, think about how she later talks about what she did in three lives as something that comes right after these years of being immersed in data collection, both about the psychological self and the brain, and thinking about how is she imagining selfhood in context of having dived into it from both of a psychological and anatomical perspective, and that she is pushing towards exhaustivity, meaning towards a fuller collection of data in a way that really messes with narrative. There's a lot of repetition.
Thinking about what if repetition and what she begins to call the continuous present in her aesthetic, that, to me, has this really important analogy to the ideal of the data collection and part of, I think, what she's showing us is that if you were able to represent the entirety of reality, it would be incomprehensible to you or at least, it would take a lot more patience on your part to get through it and thinking about, why was this important to her? Well, the idea that I pursue in the book is that she says very jokingly throughout her career, but often enough to believe she's pretty serious. She wants to be seen as a genius. She doesn't want to be an average anything. She wants to either be an amazing scientist or later an amazing writer.
But in the sciences in particular, she's running smack up against a very popular theory at the time that women could be data collectors or people embodied as female could be data collectors, because they're very good at repetitive manual labor, so she would be a great drawer of brain scans. They could never actually have scientific ideas, because only people embodied as male could be geniuses, because that being male was a propensity for creativity. She butts up against that constantly as a student of the sciences. For one reason or another, she leaves the sciences and moves towards becoming a writer. What is she doing in her early writings? She's messing with narrative by including more data and saying, "I can become a narrator. I have that status, I have that creativity."
In some ways, she has to mess with the underlying assumption that this data proves a certain identity about what it means to be female in order to claim that role of being then able to tell stories. Yeah, I'm looking really at the ... I see a lot of analogies, if not direct continuities, between what characterizes her literary work in that early period. Repetition, her theorization of this thing called the continuous present in which each point is as important as every other point, which, to me, is again, an articulation of a data-driven way of seeing the world.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
It's much more confusing than you would think.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Well, I have to say that in my vast even oceanic ignorance, I did not know about her scientific background, so I want to thank you for that.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
No problem, well, yeah.
Marshall Poe:
I had no idea.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
I stand on the shoulders of all kinds of scholarship that's been done. I draw on Maria Farland, Natalia Cecire and Stephen Meyer, who all wrote really amazing works that take scientific engagement as really central to what she was trying to do later, not as something that she was just like, "Well, I'm done with that."
Marshall Poe:
Well, now, I got to go back and read some Stein now that I know this. It's going to change the way I look at it, yeah.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
I highly recommend it.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Let's go on to the final person you deal with, that is Ida B. Wells-Barnett. I was taught Ida B. Wells. Did the Barnett get out later? Or how does that?
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah. Well, this is a decision that I made in how I was going to write about her, because I was focused ... Well, I focused on her data collecting work around anti-lynching activism, but then also her later autobiography in which she refers to herself as Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
Marshall Poe:
Oh, people should be called what they want to be called. That's basic disability.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
She did the data collection work around anti-lynching before she was married, so at that time, she was Ida B. Wells. Her earlier publications are Ida B. Wells, but I was including a pretty important focus on this later publication, where she very consciously hyphenated her name.
Marshall Poe:
Yep. Well, thank you for explaining that.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah. This was the last chapter that I wrote. In hindsight, it's amazing to me that it took me so long to figure out that this was important to this book. Yeah, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, where do you even begin? She grew up in the south, became a teacher, and at the same time she was becoming a teacher, she always wanted to be a writer. She started writing for local journals, all kinds of a very rich infrastructure that I don't know nearly enough about of periodical publishing at that time, and especially the African-American press. She was living in Memphis. There were several weeklies that were put out by African-American publishers and she started writing for one of them. Around this time, there was a horrendous lynching, where basically, these three African-American men who were running a business together, a grocery, they started a successful grocery business and it was impinging on the business of a white grocery owner.
Through a series of provocations, the white grocery owner basically puts them to a position of having to defend themselves. Then, of course, there's criminals who are violent and taken to jail and taken out of jail and shot at the edge of town without a trial or anything, of course. This is not uncommon occurrence for, at that time, Ida B. Wells. This happens in various ways, sadly, all around her. She hears about it through the news. It's a fact of life, unfortunately, at that time. But this, for her, she knows one of the men, she's a very close personal friend to that man's family, and she's not going to let it go silently, and she publishes a very short editorial where she basically says, "The reasons that you all give for lynching, none of these hold true in this case, so how do you explain that?"
She says, "I began to go through and systematically look at reports of lynchings that I'd heard about, and in every single case, the accepted narrative around lynching, that it's the result of sexual violence against white women. In every single case, it was either not alleged or never proven," and that basically-
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. This is what I find really interesting, is the almost empiricist reflex. Like, "Okay, you say this is so, well, let's go collect some data and find out." I'm sure they didn't like that at all, but then she does it.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
With revealing results.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yes. That simple editorial basically gets, the building where her newspaper is housed that she writes for, my mind is telling me it burned down, but my caution is telling me it was attacked.
Marshall Poe:
Something bad happened there, yeah.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Whether it was fully destroyed or not, I don't remember right now, but I do know that threats of physical violence came at her, even though she published ... I don't think she signed the first one, but the publication was attacked and the lives of everyone involved were threatened and she had to leave Memphis basically in order to stay alive.
Marshall Poe:
The other interesting thing about it is the almost, I wouldn't call it naive, but, well, maybe I will, and that if we just show these people, they're reasonable people, they'll stop this.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah. That's definitely something that Du Bois ... Du Bois has that moment too. Both Du Bois and Wells-Barnett have moments in their autobiographies where they said, for Du Bois it's "The world was thinking wrong about race." I was going to collect the fact to change their lines.
Marshall Poe:
Just going to show them, and then, people will stop.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah. Ida B. Wells does not have that belief very long. It very quickly moves from, in some ways, we need to show them and then they'll stop to we need to recognize that this is a fight that we're only going to win through long, concerted action and communal self-defense. That it's going to be a huge, it's not going to be a simple, "We showed you the truth, now we're going to do better." You actually have to, and a lot of what this chapter's about, it's about the labor of data, the labor of collecting data, but then the labor of ensuring that your data is received, that people actually look at it. Then, even after they've looked at it, that they do something about it, which turns out, as you say, it's not a natural instinct when it has any economic or political implication. Our instinct, once we've been confronted by what data reveals, is often to either pretend we never saw it, or to say, "Well, that's just too hard to fix." Or, ultimately, "It's just not true."
Marshall Poe:
Now, we have. It's interesting how much things have changed because now most educated people have all kinds of "sophisticated" ways, sophisticated, I put in air quotes, to dismiss data that they don't like.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Mm-hmm.
Marshall Poe:
They can talk about sample sizes and they can talk about biases among the researchers, and they can talk about the source, well, that's fake news, because it came from this outlet. They have lots of ready rationales to basically just reject data that they don't like, and this has become almost a word game for people. The belief that Du Bois and Adams and Stein and Wells-Barnett had in what is really, it's just an empiricism and rationalism like, "Okay, we'll collect the data and show them," and the disappointment that they must have felt.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Beyond that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yet, it's still ... I think, again, that's something that's very modernist about them rather than postmodern is that, that there is a core belief that there is a reality we could record and we can do better.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I agree. I see this all the time with ... I don't spend a lot of time on social media, but I lurk occasionally, and I see people just use these tropes to dismiss data they don't like all the time. They don't even think about it. They just have these tropes at hand.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Right, it's become an assumed narrative.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I would call it contempt before investigation. Like, "Sorry, this doesn't say what I wanted to say, so I'm going to say the following eight things that essentially put it into a category that makes it less than, what would you say, credible." It's very disturbing.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
It is. It is.
Marshall Poe:
I don't know what else to say about it.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
As a librarian, we are talking constantly about how we help educate around evaluating information, reasoning, and it's become not just incredibly complicated to evaluate the quality of information that you find using the primary means that we all find information, the internet, that's also the rise of, you could say, actors not in good faith about wanting to know what's real. There's no-
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, that's essentially right. It's a pseudo-skepticism. The position you're taking is, "Oh, I'm not against what you have to say, but I'm skeptical and sophisticated about data."
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Right, yeah. Right! Not without reason given how data has been manipulated historically, given that data doesn't give us a clear story. Yeah, that's a huge open question. Can we develop cultures of deliberation around data? Don't try to force it into a single narrative, but do try to make use of what it reveals?
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. It's interesting. This relates to this notion that's become very current, disinformation, and I always think to myself, when I see the word disinformation, what information isn't disinformation from somebody's point of view? It's all information depending on your point of view.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Yeah, information about something, yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, right, it's information, but if you put the disser, maybe we should have the contrary, which is plus, plus information. That's the information I like. Well, anyway, it's been lovely to talk to you. I encourage people to go read your book. Let me tell everybody that we've been talking to Liz Rodrigues about her book Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narratives as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature. It's out from the University of Michigan Press, and by the way, you can download it for free. It's open access, so you can download this book. Liz, thank you very much for being on the show.
Elizabeth Rodrigues:
Thank you so much.
Marshall Poe:
Absolutely. Bye-bye.
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