Digital analysis (of a related text)

This post details my personal analysis and the subsequent digital analysis of Walter Smith's Report on Drawing: Addressed to the School Committee, 1880. 

I came away from reading Walter Smith’s 1880 report with a feeling that it strongly connected to another part of this project, my contextual analysis of the stereoscope. I also noticed a strong emphasis on order and rule. 

In my reading of Smith’s points, “order” is derived from nature, and emphatically not framed as a social construct. This could be a rhetorical device to sell the veracity of what Smith proposes in his writing. When he writes “order,” I think he’s referencing the way in which students will see and interpret the world when they become adults. The specific things that they accept or reject— actions, places, or people— reflect the extent to which they possess “a love of the fit and beautiful.” 

Smith’s characterization of drawing feels familiar to how stereoscope kits were framed by distributors, sold to schools and teachers as a tool to shape how students saw the world and to decide what meaning they would derive from it. 

I also felt that Smith blurred the lines between the arts and the sciences, to reflect the modern STEAM framework. Smith (and STEAM, in some cases) strips the genuine creativity and critical thinking out of those fields to give students marketable skillsets that, in practice, uphold the status quo. 

After reading Smith’s report, and recording my observations, I ran the text through Voyant to obtain visualizations of the text. Those visualizations presented connections between the words “art” and “originality, attractiveness and comprehension” in Smith’s writing. 

The connection from art to attractiveness— a word that implies an unbalanced distribution of care and attention— reinforced my initial observation of Smith’s text. Drawing, in this context, is being used as a tool to dictate how children see the world. 

However, the connection from art to originality and comprehension made me doubt part of my initial analysis. While there is a difference between when someone is able to solve complex problems and when someone is able to repeat a task, it’s unwise to create broad categories of “genuine” and “disingenuous” critical thinking and creativity, with no clarification. 

Text visualization from Voyant also illustrated an emphasis on drawing, which wasn’t surprising but emphasized my lack of focus on the actual practice of drawing in my personal response. 

While there are more complex parts of Voyant that I didn’t explore here, its more easy-to-understand output provided a strong contrast to my method of interpreting the text.