Workers’ Memories: Distant Reading Exercises

CONTRERAS, GUSTAVO; LAITANO, GUILLERMINA; NIETO, AGUSTIN; RABINO, NICOLÁS

Collective Memory Narratives in Contemporary Culture

Springer Nature Switzerland

Año: 2023; p. 71 - 90

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.