Google's automatic writing and the gendering of birds

The almost meaningless faux-text-mining of a Google search on "birdlike woman" and "birdlike man" turns up the following results:

Vanilla Google:

	"woman"	"man"	ratio "woman"/"man"
"birdlike"	16, 100	2, 990	5.38
"bird-like"	74,400	272,000	0.27

Google Books:

	"woman"	"man"	ratio "woman"/"man"
"birdlike"	1, 520	606	2.5
"bird-like"	633	490	1.29

This probably tells us more about Google than about the correlation of gender and the term "birdlike." The hyphen makes a big difference in the search. This particular search also doesn't catch instances like "her movements were quick and birdlike."

I often think it would be interesting to do some small bit of real text-mining, just to have a global look at a corpus, but it's always incidental to the argument, so I never follow up.

The appeal of text-mining, which I think is actually magnified in the Google search, is that it's a kind of automatic writing, in which the body of the text (corpus) is made to give up its latent spirit. That the Google algorithm is unknown except insofar as it is known to maximize ad revenue does not diminish this appeal, the temptation to present Google hits as data. Since so much of our daily information is filtered through the Google algorithm anyway, it serves as a sort of corporate unconscious, whose essence is perhaps more compelling than truth.

The appeal of the Google search in lieu of text-mining is formalized in toys like Googlefight, which simply runs two Google searches at once and visualizes the results:

(Source.)

The bar graph calls on a visual form designed to represent meaningful data; although of course such forms are routinely abused (I particularly enjoy April Winchell's pie charts), the form still invites one to seriously compare the numbers. Yet the tongue-in-cheek cheesy stick-figure animation acknowledges the unseriousness of the Google fight. A Google fight is only good for settling a certain kind of argument, the confrontational flame-war variety that isn't particularly invested in actually solving a problem, not a debate but a "FIGHT." (I tried to get a screen shot of the "FIGHT" title, but I'm just not that quick on the draw, apparently.)

Yet for all that, toys like Google Fight are amusing (try Foucault versus Habermas!) and a little beguiling. I don't have time to prepare a corpus and an algorithm, but I do have three seconds to do a Google search, or make a Wordle.

Word cloud for Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale's The Nest-Builder (1916).

Such tools get you somewhere; they just don't get you far. It's interesting ("merely" interesting?) that the above word cloud says nothing about birds or nests, and that some of the most prominent words are "know" and "time." But of course not all words are weighted equally in a novel, and it matters that the chapters are titled "Mate-Song," "Mated," "The Nestling," "Wings," etc.--that indeed the whole marriage plot is structured around a bird allegory that disappears in the word cloud. And this may be another reason it's so appealing to let a simple Google search stand in for data, even when its unreliability is universally acknowledged. It gets you somewhere but it doesn't get you far, and in the end this is true of most text-mining, too. In the end we're fascinated by automatic writing, the possibility of forcing the body to secrete a hidden spirit, but we're also agnostic about spirit tout court. A highly sophisticated search with a known margin of error probes an ontological terrain that's suspiciously similar to the corporate unconscious, which we're tempted to say is all phony advertising anyway--or it isn't--one or the other.

Nests

I mentioned the other day that Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale was making me realize the connection between my research on Berssenbrugge and my research on Moore. I'm now realizing that comment probably made no sense to anybody but me, so here's a bit of an explanation.

My Berssenbrugge essay is about a book titled Nest (2003), which pushes hard on the idea of domestic spaces as nests and the analogy between human and animal dwellings. My essay recurs, quite naturally, to Gaston Bachelard's chapter on the nest in The Poetics of Space, which rather self-consciously conjures up sentimental images of cozy avian nuclear families (self-conscious because Bachelard has already admitted that anthropomorphizing birds is embarrassing and absurd).

My recent trawl through early twentieth-century books on girlhood, including Forbes-Robertson Hale, is making me realize how pervasive the image of the nest is in late discourses of domesticity circa 1900. Forbes-Robertson Hale's novel The Nest-Builder is a good example of that.

But it's not just that birds are used to describe the home; the home is also used to describe birds. What I hadn't realized earlier was the tightness of the connection. Ornithology circa 1900 (and this is where my Moore research comes in) was divided between an all-male profession located in universities and natural history museums and a thriving amateur bird-watching culture that was largely female. While there were many male amateur bird enthusiasts, the division between professional and popular ornithology was distinctly gendered in discourse as in membership.

It should not be supposed that the hobbyists were not serious, nor that their observations were inconsequential for the professional ornithologists. For one thing, the Audubon Society ladies were in many ways the public face of ornithology, since it was their writing and illustrations that dominated popular handbooks, texts for children, journalism, and the like, so the professional ornithologists had to reckon with them one way or another. One of the most amusing parts of researching my Marianne Moore chapter (and there were many amusing parts) was reading the spluttering reviews of popular bird books in The Auk, the organ of the American Ornithologists' Union, circa 1900. For another thing, the hobbyists were quite as serious as the professionals, and often observed specimens and behaviors in the wild before their professional counterparts did. Since the first observed specimen carried (and still carries) a good deal of importance in nomenclature, this meant that professional ornithologists, to their chagrin, sometimes had to cite the amateurs' findings in publications with hilarious titles--and by hilarious, I mean domestic.

Here are a few titles by the popular writer Olive Thorne Miller (pen name of Harriet Mann Miller): Little Brothers of the Air (1892); Four-Handed Folk (1896, on mammals rather than birds); The Bird Our Brother (1908); and of course, In Nesting Time (1888). Birds and other animals are consistently described in generally anthropomorphic and specifically familial terms. The book flap text for In Nesting Time is revealing:

These fifteen papers have such tempting titles as "Baby Birds," "A Tricksy Spirit," "A Stormy Wooing," "Friendship in Feathers," etc.; and give such wonderful revelations of bird ways and bird character as no one but a close observer would ever even imagine that our feathered friends could develop, or hardly even possess. That Mrs. Miller has given much attention to these subjects is well known; and all readers of her articles in current magazines must likewise be aware of her pleasant mode of arriving at the information which she gives so charmingly, with such sympathy, and a vivacity suited to the nature of her little companions. It has long been her wont to domesticate wild birds for a time, that she might study their dispositions and idiosyncrasies--if a bird may be said to have such; and the things that happened, the deeds that were done, the petty spites, jealousies, loves, manoeuvrings, exhibitions of craft and almost of forethought on the part of goldfinch, mocking-bird, bluebird, thrush, and others, as set forth in these pages, are as entertaining as a book of adventures. It is a most loving record, and we are assured that the sketches are "scrupulously true in every particular."

Birds here are not merely anthropomorphized; they are domesticated, made into home-dwelling creatures with "petty spites, jealousies, loves, manoeuvrings...." Moreover, this is a textual record, we are told, of literal processes of domestication, as Miller takes wild birds into her home for observation. The book flap text oscillates between enthusiasm for the domesticated quality of Miller's textual birds and Miller's "sympathy" with them, on the one hand, and skepticism that Miller's domestic language has anything to do with the reality of birds, on the other, so that the blurb ends on a strange deflection: a claim that the contents of the book are "true," distanced by quotation.

Okay, so it comes as a surprise to nobody that amateur ornithology circa 1900 anthropomorphizes animals. I mean, we still anthropomorphize animals all the time. And it's also totally unsurprising that descriptions of animals are used to naturalize human social structures; that, too, still happens all the time. What's striking is the specificity with which birds and nests are used to figure human domestic life in particular, and vice-versa, through a branch of the sciences that was distinctly feminized. Birds are also, by the way, the first specimens that museums used for "life groups," the lifelike dioramas of specimens posed in simulacra of their habitats ("homes"?) that are now the norm. (This is owing to the ease of stuffing them in a lifelike way in the later nineteenth century; I found out way too much about taxidermy researching Marianne Moore.)

Cuthbert Rookery diorama, American Museum of Natural History

The language of nests, when applied to humans, is always about regulating family and femininity, naturalizing a configuration of affective, social, and spatial bonds. But it can never not be about animals at the same time. What Marianne Moore in one way and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in another way do is reinsert the animal as such into that discourse. For Moore, the animal introduces the alien into human life; for Berssenbrugge, that the animal is all too familiar--a pet, or even a "furry child," as Donna Haraway puts it--lays bare our embarrassing willingness to conscript animals for our emotional satisfaction. They place the animal at the scene of gender-making, but they also point toward the way that the animal, too, is made by (human) gender--that we do not know a nest that does not remind us of capital-H Home, that we are never not "dressing up our pets."

Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale shuts down Susan Faludi's whole matricide thing avant la lettre:

Girls of America, your ways are not our ways. We do not always approve them, as our mothers did not always approve ours. We do not like your careless manners, your minor sexual freedoms, your powder and rouge, your indifference toward the old, your neglect of pleasing. But we like your courage, your self-confidence, your honesty and your intelligence. We think perhaps your faults lie more on the surface than ours did, but that it may be ours were none the better for being hidden.

     --Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, What's Wrong with Our Girls?, 1923 (157-8)

The nest returns

One [school of thought] sees it [the women's movement] at an end, feels that its object was attained when women won their share of democracy, and that nothing now remains for them but to use their opportunities as men do, to further whatever aims they as individuals may happen to have at heart. This school says: "Women are as various as men; they are now free to express, to compete, as men do.[...]"

     --Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, What's Wrong with Our Girls? The Environment, Training and Future of American Girls, 1923 (ix-x).

Two observations.

1. People were floating this "feminism is over!" stuff as early as 1923. Wow.

2. Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale wrote a novel, and it's called -- wait for it -- The Nest-Builder (1916). Suddenly my Berssenbrugge essay is indissolubly tied to my Marianne Moore research.