Abstract
In this chapter, we will consider workers’ memories as cultural artifacts, objects of research, and subjects of reflection based on a computational approach associated with the field of digital history: distant reading. This approach was developed to read a large corpus of literary texts and identify patterns, recurrences, longitudinal variations, and singularities. This is the perspective we will apply in this chapter, without disavowing close reading. From scalable reading exercises, particular attention will be paid to thematic, ideological, and gender variations. In methodological terms, we will work with different techniques of natural language processing (NLP) and text mining to carry out the computational reading of an intentional selection of memoirs of Argentine trade union militants produced between the mid and late twentieth century. All the exercises were carried out with function packages developed in R language in the integrated development environment (IDE) RStudio.
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Notes
- 1.
The most used packages were dplyr, tidytext, ggplot2, udpipe, quanteda, and ACEP.
- 2.
Social history has shown that workers’ memories are a rich source of information for reconstructing the perceptions that the protagonists of history themselves constructed about various aspects of their personal lives, their class culture and the society in which they lived (Neuman, 1975; Debouzy, 1986; Koenker, 2004; Shubert, 1990; Gutiérrez & Lobato, 1992).
- 3.
We thank PhD Ludmila Scheikman for providing us with the memories of Othar and Besasso.
- 4.
Nonprofit civil institution that brings together the residents of a neighborhood and promotes the improvement of the living conditions of all inhabitants in a broad sense (urban services, health, culture, etc.).
- 5.
- 6.
On the different techniques and approaches to text mining and NLP, see Gualda (2022).
- 7.
Associating the word ‘government’ with the identification of a class enemy is risky to say at least. In the case of union and politically active workers, ‘government’ could be carrying other meanings in their memories (for example, the horizon of a revolutionary government). To corroborate this, we applied a sentiment analysis to all the sentences in the corpus containing the word ‘government’. The result showed a negative sentiment in more than 60% of the cases. In addition, neutral sentiment was detected in about 30%. Only 7% of the sentences presented a positive sentiment. Overall, the test confirms the relevance of associating the high frequency of the word with the identification of a class enemy.
- 8.
Linyera, walker, man who goes walking (according to the idioms and lunfardias in the speech of the crotos).
- 9.
In spanish the word “obrera” not only refers to working women, but is also used as an adjective, as in the examples we are looking at.
- 10.
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Contreras, G., Laitano, G., Nieto, A., Rabino, N. (2023). Workers’ Memories: Distant Reading Exercises. In: Pocecco, A., Gualda, E., Mangone, E. (eds) Collective Memory Narratives in Contemporary Culture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41921-8_5
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