Class of 2027 Majors in Computational Media and History
My project, titled AsteXT, uses Natural Language Processing and cluster analysis to analyze Asian American short stories published in serial literary magazines between 1974 and 2024. The field of short stories is an understudied topic compared to the novel and poetry forms. Yet, authors intentionally, and many times unintentionally, blend their reactions, thoughts, and emotions toward the politics, social norms, and the structure of their communities into their short stories. This makes short stories vital vehicles in creating a network of Asian American experiences preserved in ostensibly fictional tales. This project aims to discover how the linguistic choices in these stories changed in these five decades. Through the medium of the short story, this project also hopes to develop possible junctions between digital humanities methodologies in NLP and Asian American Studies.
