About

Team

The project, The Gender Split: West Indian Literature, 1961-1990 is part of a larger project called Writers, Readers, and Scenes: Visualizing Caribbean Literature, which aims to expand critical engagement with Caribbean literary history and add a dimension to the literary reception and depth of Caribbean communities.

Student Contributor, Mhea Bardouille

Why, hello there! My name is Mhea Bardouille, and I am a soon-to-be graduate of Dominica State College, where I majored in Accounting and Information Technology. During my internship at Create Caribbean Research Institute and while enrolled in HIS 115: Digital Humanities, my appreciation for research has expeditiously increased as I acquired new skills and learned technical tools to analyze and visualize my research findings.

Moreover, through my contribution to Writers, Readers, and Scenes: Visualizing Caribbean Literature, I have gained first-hand experience with the storage, analysis, and cleaning of big data to create smart unstructured and structured data; applying ethical considerations in the data curation process to ensure the selection, arrangement, and presentation of materials that investigate topics such as race, gender, sexuality, disability, and socioeconomic status without marginalizing communities; and applying logical algorithmic thinking and computational methods to create digital humanist projects.

My conceptualisation for this project came about when I wanted to explore if certain gender disparities that existed within my assigned time period for WRS, 1971–1980, were consistent with the data set of the entire project or limited to this period. Thus, in my course blog, I recorded these observations, such as there was a significant difference in the number of male and female authors, poets, and writers who published literary works from 1961–1990 and there was a high concentration of authors in a few selected countries.

After completing this digital humanities project, I have a newfound appreciation for Willaim Thomas’ article,“What We Think We Will Build and What We Build in Digital Humanities”.

“In digital humanities, what we think we will build and what we build are often quite different, and unexpectedly so. It’s this radical disjuncture that offers us both opportunities and challenges.” - Willaim Thomas

After my initial idea for this project, I decided to expand this project to explore if gender variances exist in different elements, specifically ethnicities and genres.

To create, The Gender Split: West Indian Literature, 1961-1990 Voyant Tools was used to conduct textual analysis to decipher patterns in texts, Knightlab’s story map was used to geographically map the authorship country, and the contents and analysis were hosted on a site, using the static site generator, Jekyll.