I am thinking through Jo Guldi’s article about “critical search” and bringing in my memories from her talk here at Pitt in January titled “A Distant Reading of Property: Topic Models, Divergence, Collocation, and Other Text-Mining Strategies to Understand a Modern Intellectual Revolution in the Archives,” which dove further into her research about British Parliamentary papers and tenant issues. For my research, I am reading the newspaper Lampião da Esquina, a monthly publication in Brazil from 1978-1981 produced for and by gay people. An NGO, Grupo Dignidade, an advocacy group for LGBTQ Brazilians, scanned the individual editions of Lampião in Brazil (date unknown). I mention this to say that I do not have the physical copies of Lampião and did not scan them myself – I am working with only what I found online.

The corpus consists of 35 documents, and according to voyant has just over 1.1 million words. The scanned PDFs were run through an OCR program and allow me to search for keywords. Similar to Guldi’s search for the term “tenant” and its usage, I am interested in how the text in Lampião utilizes “pleasure” (prazer).[1] Performing a keyword search for prazer throughout the entire corpus allows me to see how popular the term is over the span of the newspaper’s publishing, and which issues have a particularly high frequency. For example, running a keyword search in Adobe results in 304 instances of the word prazer. That is, however, the ones that the program can read – certainly there are usages of prazer that escape the search due to poor scanning, definition, or non-standard text-font.

How can I incorporate Guldi’s “Critical Search” in my research of gay identity and publications like Lampião? Regarding “seeding,” I came to Lampião after conducting a broad, internet keyword search for “gay rights Brazil” (or something similar). Several results indicated that Lampião was the first nationally distributed publication and was foundational in establishing a national movement. Indeed, many monographs on the topic also argue for Lampião’s importance. I may be able to “broadly winnow” the corpus by identifying which editions more frequently engage with the term prazer. Hopefully later, then, through “guided reading” may I begin to consider ways to make contributions to the field in general.

Conducting preliminary “Critical Searches” on prazer in Lampião has led me to further questions. Why was there such a large spike in the use of the word in late 1980? When is prazer evoked, in what context, and by whom? What do the writers mean by prazer? What about other similar words like desire (desejo), happiness (alegria), satisfaction (satisfação), or enjoyment (gozo) – why specifically prazer? How, if at all, do the publications for other contemporaneous social movements (like the Black consciousness movement, the labor/socialist movement, or environmentalists) use prazer? I anticipate that applying methods addressed in Guldi’s and others’ publications from the semester will help me identify key moments and actors for further research.

[1] In November of 1978 Lampião da Esquina (Lamp on the Street Corner) introduced a new subtitle – “Lampião discusses the only topic still taboo in Brazil: pleasure.”