About Us
Data, like all analysis, is constructed by people who see things a certain way. Even though we try to be as transparent as possible on this site about our data and our process, all of this starts with us, with who we are as scholars and fans. So, allow us to introduce ourselves.
Rebecca Rowe
This all started with a trend that I find fascinating. I'm a children's literature and media scholar, and I enjoy studying audiences, reception, and fandom. Like many people my age, I was introduced to fandom through Harry Potter. I am not only a fan of Harry Potter, I’m a fan of the fandom (as you can see in this picture of me and my mom at Leaky Con) as well as a fledgling scholar thereof. I’ve enjoyed watching and participating in this amazing activist community for years, and I'm now using my scholarship to explore it further. One of the most interesting things I have noticed in this time is the decidedly complicated relationship the fandom
has with the series’ author, J. K. Rowling. Then, as Tolonda and I began this project (spring of 2019), my Twitter feed blew up with a new wave of frustration as Rowling continued to give more details about Dumbledore's sexuality while refusing to include any homosexuality in Fantastic Beasts. I began to wonder how this frustration affects the Harry Potter fan fiction that I read. I thus approach this project in a dual position, as fan and scholar. My identity as one always affects the other: I would not have known about this issue except that I am engaged in these communities; I would not have known what to do with this trend except for my training in scholarship. I come into this project expecting to find fan writing becoming increasingly dissimilar to the series because of the trends I've seen in my own fan communities. Now, I just need to see what the data says.
Tolonda Henderson
As a Harry Potter scholar, I have given many presentations about The Boy Who Lived at academic conferences and fan conventions. I have also published two book chapters, one on the visual culture of Harry Potter (co-written with Amy Von Lintel) and one on the series from a Fat Studies perspective. Both of those projects used a concordance program to identify trends in the text. My work tends to focus on the seven books, so I was intrigued by Rebecca's invitation to consider them alongside the fandom for this project. Investigating the relationships among words in both sets of texts
has been quite intriguing. While my current interests are shifting towards disability in young adult literature, I would not have even begun to consider that as an area of study without my commitment to academic investigation of the Wizarding world.
With a little help from our friends
A common question about digital humanities is whether you have to be a builder to do the work. Alan Liu lifts up the fact that digital humanities projects “require[] a combination of skills in programming and interpretation” (412) but suggests that that question whether one person has to do both implies an individual working on their own -- an idea he refers to as obsolete. We make a great team, bouncing interpretive possibilities off of each other, but we have also leaned into the reality that there are limits to what each of us can build. Thus, we chose to work with a Computer Science graduate student, Tianyu Wang, because she had experience with the programs and algorithms we use and was a fan of Harry Potter. She has written the programs that extract the data itself. Moreover, Kelly Mahaffy, a fellow English graduate student and coder extraordinaire, has helped us work through coding issues with the site and the graphs we include. While we have designed and implemented most of this project, this work would be impossible without Tianyu's and Kelly's coding.