Project Name: Queer Text Toolkit

Grantee: Filipa Calado

Discipline: English
Funding Cycle: 2022–2023

Project Status:

White Paper: 

 

About the Project:

 

The “Queer Text Toolkit” (Qtt) is a software package for studying queer literature. The project consists of two applications, “queer distant reading” and “queer text encoding,” which build from open source software to offer an introductory, hands-on experience for quantitative text analysis and semantic markup. The toolkit is a digital component to my dissertation, “’Since No Expressions Do’: Queer Tools for Reading, Editing, and Archiving,” which draws from Queer Studies’s critique of heteronormative structures to problematize the reduction of gender, sex, and sexuality in literary text into computable formats.

As a practical application of my dissertation research, the toolkit reveals interpretive possibilities for reworking text analysis and text encoding procedures for exploring queerness in text. Here, users examine firsthand how digital formats, which often collapse stylistic and formal expressions of gender, sex, and sexuality into computable “data,” can be redeployed to surface the complexity and fundamental instability of queerness. Aimed at an audience of humanist scholars at the beginning of their technical training, this project also aims to lower the barrier of entry to computational tools, demystifying how processes like text cleaning regularize and abstract textual data into workable units.