FRAGMENTATION ARCHIVE

Meet the Team

Jo: Jo is a first-year PhD student in UCLA’s English department, where she studies contemporary Asian American cultural productions that are particularly attentive to queer diasporic sensibilities. As a researcher of aesthetic and effectual practices, they thread together the theoretical frameworks of queer of color critique, affect theory, memory studies, performance strategies, and digital humanities. Their background in affect studies and contemporary poetics helps illuminate the intersection of literary theories, expressive cultures, and digital analytics. For this project, she supports the curation and archiving of fragmentation prose and poetry. To that end, Jo’s role as the Literary and Text Analyst seeks to make the diverse modes of writing loss and fragmentation accessible in order to reimagine memory and healing. 

Rachel: Rachel is an MA student in East Asian Studies at UCLA. She serves as a Text Analyst and Research Assistant in this project. Her academic background provides her with a deep understanding of cultural, historical, and linguistic contexts, which is crucial for analyzing a wide range of texts, especially those that require insight into East Asian literature and cultures. In her role as a Text Analyst, she applies her expertise with digital humanities tools, such as  Voyant Tools, to dissect patterns of fragmentation in literature, identifying nuances that might be overlooked without a firm grasp of the underlying cultural context. As a Research Assistant, she is actively involved in conducting literature reviews, collecting data, and performing preliminary analyses, tasks that benefit from my training in the humanities. This blend of technical and humanities qualifications equips her to navigate the complex intersections of literature, neuroscience, and psychology within the team’s study on fragmentation.

Valerie: Valerie is a first-year PhD student in UCLA’s English department. She studies Chicana/o cultural productions, particularly poetry and print culture, during the late twentieth century. She also studied Economics as an undergraduate and pays careful attention to data analysis and collection throughout her work. This combination of study allows her to bring a data-centric focus to literary analysis. During this project, as a literary and data analyst Valerie will bring her interdisciplinary background to help collect data, analyze texts, and track trends of fragmentation throughout our archive. Valerie hopes this project can help us track fragmentation throughout a diverse array of texts and literary artifacts.

Collin: Collin is a Ph.D. student in the Classics department at UCLA. His research focuses on poetry as a window into the Ancient Greek environmental imagination. In his dissertation, he traces the intricate entanglement of tree death and human mortality in Homeric poetry and explores how this relationship pushes the limits of figurative language by collapsing similes, reviving dead metonyms, and foregrounding the failure of metaphor. For the current project, he will apply his skills of literary analysis to the different textual levels made accessible through the digital tools of textual analysis and thereby uncover patterns of psychological fragmentation in response to environmental disasters.

Mason: Mason is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at UCLA. His research focuses on how traumatic experiences affect the temporal structure of episodic and autobiographical memories. He works with clinical psychologists in the ADRC to inform therapies for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. His basic and translational research has demonstrated that negative emotional states result in mnemonic and linguistic fragmentation and that narrative structure in traumatic memories can lead to improved therapy outcomes for PTSD patients. His work employs computational tools, such as large-language models, to measure memory structure. For the current project, he will use his background in cognitive psychology and neuroscience to help conceptualize fragmentation, as well as his computational skills to help organize and measure features of fragmentation of archived texts.

What is Fragmentation?

“The self is written in one unbroken text” – John Russon

We aim to enhance our understanding of fragmentation, a concept with roots as ancient as Sappho’s poetry. This concept of fragmentation, observed in the residues of medieval and Renaissance texts, gained profound intellectual and artistic significance in the 20th and 21st centuries, particularly within modernist prose and poetry. Scholars like Hans-Jost Frey have characterized literary fragments as inherently resistant to conventional meaning and understanding, a sentiment echoed by Alain Montandon, who views fragmentation as “an endured violence, an intolerable disintegration.” David Metzer further elaborates on this by describing fragmentation’s role in disrupting the continuity of time, creating gaps that evoke a deep sense of loss and yearning for wholeness.

We are innovating a new methodology of locating and interpreting fragmentation resulting from trauma in literary texts. We will achieve this goal by applying Voyant and other digital tools of textual analysis to a diverse set of texts, comparing and contrasting the evidence for fragmentation among the texts, and interpreting the patterns of fragmentation in light of current research on trauma and the fragmentation of memory in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. The expected output of the project will be an archive of fragmented texts, a methodology, and an interactive platform for other researchers in the humanities to analyze texts from their own fields of study to identify patterns of fragmentation. The interactive platform will enable a broad audience, including researchers and scholars in the humanities, to explore and analyze fragmentation within their respective fields, fostering a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between trauma and literary expression. 

Enhancing the Humanities

Our project stands at the intersection of literary studies and Cognitive Science, aiming to enhance our understanding of fragmentation and how it plays a critical role in the narrative structure and thematic development of literary texts across cultures. 

In the contemporary landscape, fragmentation is embraced as an emancipatory tool against the totality of hegemonic narratives, celebrating the genre’s inherent incompleteness as a resistance to dominant knowledge systems. This aesthetic of fragmentation, serves not just as a narrative technique but as a political strategy, opening up spaces for alternative modes of healing and understanding. Our work will directly benefit scholars, students, and practitioners within the humanities by providing new insights into the study of fragmentation in literature, demonstrating the potential of digital humanities tools to uncover deeper layers of meaning within texts. 

By focusing on the digital analysis of literary fragmentation, we aim to contribute to the development of experimental methods and tools within the humanities, utilizing open-source software to ensure wide accessibility and to support NEH’s goal of broad dissemination of digital scholarship. This interdisciplinary approach addresses a critical need within literary studies and offers a model for how digital humanities can foster innovative research methodologies that bridge literature, psychology, and neuroscience, enhancing our understanding of the human condition.

Environmental Scan

Ample clinical evidence suggests that traumatic events are not only vividly remembered, but often are remembered in a disordered or “fragmented” way. It is thought that this sense of fragmentation for events surrounding a traumatic incident, such as not remembering what happened before being struck by a vehicle, is related to clinical symptoms of trauma such as persistent, intrusive and debilitating memories of the event. There has been keen interest in the cognitive neuroscience of memory to understand under what conditions memories become fragmented, how to conceptualize and measure memory disorder, and what features of memory are treatable through clinical intervention.

Of particular interest are theories of episodic memory, or how memories get represented as individual episodes or units. Recent evidence suggests that negative emotional events can result in memories becoming less integrated through a process known as “event segmentation”. While adaptive under normal circumstances (e.g., walking through a doorway leads to forgetting of previous contexts in order to engage in new goals in the new context), segmenting memories too much through persistent emotional experiences may result in the disintegration of episodes. Furthermore, work on emotion and attention has long shown that when a negative event occurs, attention orients toward lower-level perceptual and causal details comprising the event. This low-level orientation of attention comes at the expense of awareness of broader, contextual details, such as the time and place of an event. Therefore, fragmentation of memory for traumatic events may arise through complimentary processes that affect our representation of and attention for temporal and spatial contexts.

Critically, novel clinical interventions seek to re-integrate fragmented memories. While literature on these efforts is sparse, they have included “coherence therapies” whereby patients reorder and interpret otherwise fragmented events. Engaging in narrative inference may help scaffold otherwise fragmented memories, resulting in improved sense of meaning. 

While the clinical and cognitive neuroscience fields approach fragmentation in a very hegemonic fashion, creative literature, including poetry and novels, often lean into aspects of fragmentation to represent and extract meaning from trauma. This presents an intriguing possible misalignment of approach to traumatic fragmentation across scientific and humanistic disciplines: do we attempt to scaffold fragments into linear stories, or do we embrace and interpret the fragments on their own grounds? Importantly, allowing fragmentation to be represented in myriad ways allows for creative opportunity to interpret what happened, how fragmentation is actually represented in cognition, and what social constraints exist for interpreting fragmentation. Therefore, literature may provide more flexible and ultimately adaptive modes of fragmentation. 

Given these modes of fragmentation expression, the present project aims to better understand how fragmentation is understood and represented in clinical, scientific, and literary contexts. Knowing the respective goals, procedures, and modes for representing fragmentation across these disciplines may provide important bidirectional insights that may assist clinical interventions, inspire novel literary methods, or simply help conceptualize what is meant by “fragmentation” in the context of trauma. Further, we aim to operationalize measures of fragmentation that can be applied across disciplines.  

History of the Project

This project seeks to study how literary texts manifest fragmentation resulting from psychological trauma via digital tools of textual analysis. The team agreed that each collaborator would carry out a literary and digital analysis of their chosen text and compare the results to identify the consistencies and differences with regard to the phenomenon of fragmentation.

Project Plan

During the project’s performance period, our team will engage in a series of carefully planned activities to innovate and share methodologies for analyzing fragmentation in literature, with implications for understanding trauma in both humanities and sciences. Our team members, each with distinct responsibilities, will collaborate to ensure the project’s success, fostering an environment of project-based learning and professional development for all involved.

Major Activities 

• Literature Review and Framework Development (Months 1-3)
• Methodology Design (Months 4-6)
• Text Selection and Preliminary Analysis (Months 7-9)
• Deep Dive Analysis (Months 10-12)
• Comparative Study (Months 13-15)
• Synthesis and Interpretation (Months 16-18)
• Dissemination and Feedback (Months 19-21)
• Finalization and Publication (Months 22-24)

Case Study 1

Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata intricately explores the themes of societal expectations, particularly focusing on compulsory heterosexuality and neurotypicality, through the lens of its protagonist, Keiko Furukura. The novel’s unique approach to these themes is deeply intertwined with the concept of fragmentation, both in its narrative structure and in the portrayal of its characters’ development and interactions. This analysis delves into how fragmentation is manifested in the novel and how it enhances the thematic exploration Murata aims to achieve.

Murata uses Keiko’s life as a microcosm to critique societal pressures that enforce a narrow conception of what is considered a ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ existence. Keiko, who has always felt out of place due to her inability to innately understand social cues and to conform to societal norms, finds solace and a sense of identity within the structured environment of the convenience store. This setting becomes a significant site for the examination of compulsory heterosexuality and neurotypicality. The convenience store acts as a haven for Keiko, where these societal expectations can be met or mimicked through the performance of her role within this micro-society.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=f1f2b6ee45ec7cfdfcadb4aed0aa82ff&query=store&query=shiraha&chartType=stacked&view=Trends

x-axis: 27 segments

y-axis : the relative frequencies of “Shiraha” and “store”

Identified by the word frequency graph, the store and Shiraha are catalysts for development

The intrusion of Shiraha into Keiko’s life and the convenience store environment acts as a disruptive force, bringing to the forefront the limitations and constraints of the societal expectations Keiko had been trying to navigate. Shiraha’s criticisms of societal expectations and his failure to adhere to the traditional roles expected of him provide a contrast to Keiko’s approach to blending in. This dynamic adds complexity to Keiko’s development, pushing her toward a deeper understanding of her own identity in relation to societal norms.

Fragmentation in the Structure: Change of Scene and Ending a Train of Thoughts

The narrative structure of Convenience Store Woman is emblematic of the concept of fragmentation. Murata frequently employs shifts in scene—both spatial and temporal—to reflect the disjointed nature of Keiko’s experiences and perceptions. These shifts serve to disrupt the narrative flow, mirroring the disruptions in Keiko’s life and thought processes, especially as she grapples with Shiraha’s intrusion and the resultant upheaval in her meticulously constructed existence.

Fragmentation in the Plot: Character Growth, Relationships, and Backgrounds

The fragmentation is further observed in the plot’s focus on the growth of characters, the evolution of relationships, and the changes in backgrounds. Keiko’s character development is presented in fragments of her life, offering glimpses into her past and present that highlight her struggles and growth. The changing dynamics of her relationships, especially with Shiraha and her coworkers, showcase the shifting landscapes of human connections influenced by external pressures and internal transformations. 

Conclusion

Through the lens of fragmentation, Convenience Store Woman presents a nuanced critique of societal norms and expectations. Murata’s narrative technique, combined with her profound character studies, effectively highlights the challenges faced by those who find themselves at odds with the prescribed roles of society. 

Case Study 2

Kaveh Akbar, Unburnable the Cold is Flooding Our Lives (2016)

In contrast to novelistic forms of fragmentation, this literary method can also be visualized through poetic structure. Kaveh Akbar, an Iranian-American writer based in Iowa City, is an exemplary artist of this technique. He is the author of two poetry collections, Pilgrim Bell (2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2017), in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (2017). 

This poem, “Unburnable the Cold is Flooding Our Lives,” comes from his chapbook, which is a collection that centers around the limitations of language, particularly a language of silence, absence, and rupture that might elucidate the complex and vexed dimensions of addiction. Overall, this poem is a reminder that recovery is not simply a return to some originary state of health nor is it a permanent condition that can easily cohere. Akbar shapes and reshapes his conception of “healing” through the affective experiences of instability, loss, and disintegration. To him, recovery is always incomplete, and such notions are registered not only at the level of his language but emerge in his poetic structure. 

“Unburnable the Cold is Flooding Our Lives” reckons with the destabilizing forces of irreverence and skepticism, as figured through its medial caesuras— the unpunctuated breaks throughout the page. So, the poem jumps from idea to idea without caution, without hesitation. In doing so, the work enhances and revels in the feeling of rupture. In an interview with Tess Liem, Akbar discusses how he views these breaks as “breaths,” as a way to shape silence through using the negative space of language. He uses fragmentation through the lens of an endured violence, as a feeling of loss, as something broken that is part of a whole. The line that really illuminates this concern is: “sometimes a mind is ready to leave // the world before its body” which stretches not only over two lines, but two stanzas. The following litany of “and yet” towards the poem’s conclusion exemplifies the incompleteness of this work. The resistance against easy comprehension and categorization embraces an alternative definition of healing, one that is predicated upon nonlinearity and fluidity. Akbar’s language works to deliver both pleasure and pain, intertwining the embodied affects of violence and trauma. 

Voyant Analysis

Analyzing this poem through Voyant shows that the most used words were “body,” “life,” “leave,” “hungry,” and “glad,” which was unsurprising. These are all terms concerned with beinghood, either as something physically embodied or as an intangible condition. In terms of trends, “hungry” showed up most frequently in the beginning, whereas “glad” showed up in the end. Interestingly, “body” does not come in until the middle, coming after “hungry,” “life,” and “leave.” Of course, doing an analysis of the entire chapbook would produce more generative results. The results of TermsBerry is particularly notable, though, in seeing which words show up in proximity to the most frequent ones:

Body: “paradise,” “unarmored”

Life: “quietly,” “things,” “live,” “unfold,” “violent”

Leave: “ready,” “world”

Hungry: “mouths,” “envy”

Glad: N/A

As these are merely preliminary findings, the project members will run an overarching text analysis of Portrait of the Alcoholic. With this, they will conduct a more thorough poetic analysis that links together these digital tools with traditional literary methods. 

Later on in the project, the team hopes to run a Voyant analysis of Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell, to see how fragmentation and fracture are threaded throughout his particular set of aesthetics.

Final Products and Dissemination

The project aims to deliver innovative and impactful final products that directly align with its interdisciplinary exploration of fragmentation across literature, neuroscience, and psychology. These products and their dissemination strategies are meticulously designed to resonate with and impact diverse audiences, from academics and researchers to educators, students, and the general public interested in the intersections of literary analysis, trauma studies, and digital humanities.

Final Products

1. Digital Archive of Fragmented Texts: A curated, accessible digital repository of texts demonstrating various forms of fragmentation. This archive will serve as a primary resource for scholars, educators, and the public, enabling deep dives into the thematic and formal elements of fragmentation in literature and beyond.
2. Analytical Tools and Methodologies: Development and sharing of innovative digital humanities methodologies for analyzing textual fragmentation. This includes customized applications of Voyant Tools and narrative modeling, accompanied by comprehensive documentation to facilitate reuse and adaptation by other researchers.
3. Research Publications: A series of scholarly articles detailing the project’s findings, methodologies, and theoretical contributions. These will be submitted to open-access journals to ensure wide accessibility, supporting the project’s commitment to enhancing scholarly research, teaching, and learning in the humanities.
4. Public-Facing Summary and Interactive Platform: A website or digital platform presenting the project’s outcomes in an engaging, accessible format for a broader audience. This platform will include interactive elements, such as visualizations of textual analyses and narratives, to make the concept of fragmentation tangible to non-specialists.

Dissemination and Outreach Plans

1.  Academic Conferences and Workshops: Presenting research findings and methodologies at relevant conferences and workshops to engage with scholars and practitioners across the fields of literature, digital humanities, neuroscience, and psychology.
2. Public Lectures and Events: Organizing public lectures and events in collaboration with cultural institutions, libraries, and educational organizations. These events will highlight the project’s interdisciplinary approach and its relevance to understanding contemporary issues related to memory, trauma, and cultural expression.
3. Webinars and Online Training Sessions: Conducting webinars and training sessions to demonstrate the use of digital humanities tools in analyzing textual fragmentation. These sessions aim to build capacity among researchers and educators in applying innovative analytical methods.
4. Social Media and Electronic Media Outreach: Utilizing social media and other electronic media channels to promote the project’s findings, events, and resources. This strategy aims to foster a community of interest and encourage ongoing dialogue around the project’s themes.

Data Management Plan

Our website will be the gateway to our research and the archive. Therefore, we have planned in our budget to maintain the website for at least 5 years and the archive via cloud storage indefinitely. This will ensure that other researchers and members of the public will have access to our research as well as the ability to access and contribute to the fragmentation archive.