I am thinking through Jo Guldi\u2019s article about \u201ccritical search\u201d and bringing in my memories from her talk here at Pitt in January titled \u201cA Distant Reading of Property: Topic Models, Divergence, Collocation, and Other Text-Mining Strategies to Understand a Modern Intellectual Revolution in the Archives,\u201d which dove further into her research about British Parliamentary papers and tenant issues. For my research, I am reading the newspaper Lampi\u00e3o 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 Lampi\u00e3o in Brazil (date unknown). I mention this to say that I do not have the physical copies of Lampi\u00e3o and did not scan them myself \u2013 I am working with only what I found online.<\/p>\n
The corpus consists of 35 documents, and according to voyant<\/a> 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\u2019s search for the term \u201ctenant\u201d and its usage, I am interested in how the text in Lampi\u00e3o utilizes \u201cpleasure\u201d (prazer<\/em>).[1]<\/a> Performing a keyword search for prazer<\/em> throughout the entire corpus allows me to see how popular the term is over the span of the newspaper\u2019s 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. <\/em>That is, however, the ones that the program can read \u2013 certainly there are usages of prazer<\/em> that escape the search due to poor scanning, definition, or non-standard text-font.<\/p>\n How can I incorporate Guldi\u2019s \u201cCritical Search\u201d in my research of gay identity and publications like Lampi\u00e3o? Regarding \u201cseeding,\u201d I came to Lampi\u00e3o after conducting a broad, internet keyword search for \u201cgay rights Brazil\u201d (or something similar). Several results indicated that Lampi\u00e3o was the first nationally distributed publication and was foundational in establishing a national movement. Indeed, many monographs on the topic also argue for Lampi\u00e3o\u2019s importance. I may be able to \u201cbroadly winnow\u201d the corpus by identifying which editions more frequently engage with the term prazer<\/em>. Hopefully later, then, through \u201cguided reading\u201d may I begin to consider ways to make contributions to the field in general.<\/p>\n Conducting preliminary \u201cCritical Searches\u201d on prazer<\/em> in Lampi\u00e3o 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<\/em> evoked, in what context, and by whom? What do the writers mean by prazer<\/em>? What about other similar words like desire (desejo<\/em>), happiness (alegria<\/em>), satisfaction (satisfa\u00e7\u00e3o<\/em>), or enjoyment (gozo<\/em>) \u2013 why specifically prazer<\/em>? 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<\/em>? I anticipate that applying methods addressed in Guldi\u2019s and others\u2019 publications from the semester will help me identify key moments and actors for further research.<\/p>\n