1. Mentor: Dr. Peter Mallios Librarian: Tim Hackman
Team POLITIC
30 Seconds. Introduce Team, Acronym, Team members, Mentor & Librarian
Political Opinions in Literature: Identifying Themes in International Compositions
Robert Cai, Matthew Carr, Adam Elrafei, Alexander Goniprow, Adrian Hamins- Puertolas, Manpreet Khural, Andrew Li, Alexandra Winter, Soumya Yanamandra, Dan Yang, and Kay Zhang
Mentor: Dr. Peter Mallios Librarian: Tim Hackman

2. Background
In schools, there are many books teachers use, but we only use a select few – why are these books chosen? What makes them so special? We believe that there is a relationship between government and the reception of books we read. We may read the books we read because there is a political background to them.
Since the United States is a democracy, the citizens’ perception of foreign countries has a direct  relationship with foreign policies enacted
A thorough understanding of how the public gathers its perceptions of foreign cultures is crucial to navigating diplomatic crises
To become a better-informed political citizen of the United States, one must learn to think critically about the uses of foreign literature
There have been numerous conflicts in the past and present that arguably could have been avoided if the US was more cognizant of foreign cultures.

3. The big question
Did reception of Russian novels and authors in the United States and United States foreign policy toward Russia  reflect each other from ?
Hypothesis
Reception of Russian literature in the United States significantly correlates with United States policies toward Russia
Inherent ties between literary evaluation and political understanding
Defining this reception through public mass media print – we believe this is a good representation of reception
1 minute.
We aim to look at whether there are any similarities between foreign policies and the perceptions of those foreign nations due to their literature.

4. Why? Why Literature? Foreign literature is very important
Relationship between societal attitude and interpretation of foreign literature to support it (Griswold)
Foreign literature is one important medium that exposes the United States to the political and cultural ideologies of other countries (Griswold 1077)
Literary evaluation is “not an activity that is performed outside of political struggles… but arises from them” (Tompkins)
1 Minute. Lit Review

5. Russia, 1900-1923 Why 1900-1923? Why Russia? Upper bound of 1923
All preceding publications are in the public domain and we can publicly release all collected data, articles after 1923 are bound by copyright – anyone can use these articles in this time frame so the database will be very easily improved upon – we are willing to go beyond this bound for a larger sample size
Lower bound of 1900
Guarantee that a significant number of periodicals for examination will be available
Russia was a focal point of the US from
Time period contained relatively small number of significant Russian authors whose works were available in English
World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the threat of communism led to increased interest in Russia
Russia is still politically relevant to US foreign policy today
Major international power
There is research concerning England, but not much regarding Russia
Why Russia?

6. Literature Review

7. Previous Studies 1 Minute. Introduce Research Problem
These slides are research that we conducted to support our methodology
Emerson analyzed Leo Tolstoy’s views on war through a close reading of his many texts (1855)
Only looked at themes
Goldfarb studied how a prominent literary critic, William Dean Howells, supported Tolstoy’s works in the United States during the 1900s (318)
Only one who looked at reception, but only through one critic – very limited study
Only a few studies address Russian literary reception in the United States during the early twentieth century
We intend to expand on such studies by using comprehensive statistical tools to analyze a wider base of reception material
1 Minute. Introduce Research Problem

8. Canon Formation and Politics
The idea of a national literature emerged in the late eighteenth century as a way of proving cultural independence on an international level (Corse, Nationalism and Literature 7-14)
Theories of canon formation state novels have to experience a conjunction of large sales and certain types of recognition to reach canonical status (Ohmann 206)
We’re looking at wide readership articles for our reception analysis – very public, mass media articles – something to describe all of US in order to understand which authors were prominent during this time period
1 Minute. Introduce Research Problem

9. Topic Modeling
Researchers use topic modeling to analyze large corpora of data
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a more specific type of topic modeling, asserts each document from a larger corpus consists of a plurality of topics (Chaney and Blei 2)
Topics Over Time (TOT) model is able to predict the timestamps of documents and generates topics that are “more distinct from each other than LDA topics” (Wang and McCallum 5)
In our research, we will also use a TOT model to  analyze Russian literature and  political documents as a function of time
1 Minute. Introduce Research Problem

10. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis focuses on the opinion expressed about the subject matter of the data (Lee and Pang 1)
For our project, sentiment analysis methods will allow us to quickly categorize articles by gauging the overall opinions of Russian authors and novels during different time periods
In addition, incorporating a sentiment categorization into our database will allow future researchers to quickly add to and examine our data
1 Minute. Introduce Research Problem

11. Foreign Policy
Many previous studies have determined United States foreign policy towards various nations by analyzing its components
Rick Travis analyzes foreign policy towards Africa by focusing on foreign aid to the continent (798)
Haslam focuses on direct foreign investment and the corresponding treaties to determine United States foreign policy toward other nations (1182)
For our study, we will gather data on “exports, imports, investments, arms sales, and categories of foreign aid (bilateral, aggregate, and per capita)” between the United States and the Russian Empire to define United States foreign policy (Watson 253)
1 Minute. Introduce Research Problem

12. Methodology

13. Selecting Authors
We compiled a list of all Russian literary figures whose works had English translations during our time period of interest
Using that list, we cataloged the number of search results found in the Readers’ Guide Retrospective for each literary figure of interest
From this preliminary summary of the availability of periodicals in the United States specifically discussing Russian literary figures, we chose to investigate Dostoevsky and Tolstoy
Robert start

14. Database Russian Literature Database Reader’s Guide Retrospective
Foreign Policy Database
Journal articles
Statistics
We will construct a database containing these articles using the Readers’ Guide Retrospective index, which will allow us to analyze subsets of our database in the future
The Retrospective’s emphasis on more popular periodicals fits well with our intent to gain a better understanding of how the United States public perceived selected Russian literary figures in the early 1900’s
Example statistics regarding foreign aid, trade relations, and military presence in Russia
The Library of Congress has made all of this data available in digital almanacs

15. Scanning We will digitize physical or microfilm versions of articles
We are currently scanning articles by using publicly available resources at the University of Maryland  McKeldin Library
We have standardized scanning techniques and settings to reduce preventable variations in image quality and size
Once saved, the file is left unmodified with the exception of cropping. The team will not manipulate images after scanning to retain the original image data, quality, and integrity

16. Article Processing
We will convert these files to readable documents through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software
We are using ABBYY FineReader 11 to save the files as plain text documents, DjVu files, and FineReader documents
Topic modeling and sentiment analysis software analyze plain text files
DjVu format compresses documents and maintains the layout of text on each page
Save FineReader files to document the transition from scanned image to readable text
At this stage, we remove pictures from the pages

17. Manual Annotation
We will annotate the articles to generate metadata, information that computers cannot answer and that require human analysis
For the Russian literature database, the questions will focus on the discourse surrounding the predominant Russian authors occurring across the United States
Example questions:
Was an author liked or disliked?
If the author was disliked, were any counter arguments presented?
Was an author compared or contrasted with the United States?
If the author was compared to the United States, was the author’s literary style or viewpoints on issues mostly discussed?
Rob End
Two levels of annotation: manual (annotation form of various questions), we will use these to jumpstart the annotation process – overall goal is to create a form to teach the computer to annotate on its own – several different revisions of the questionnaire, which by the end will hopefully be an unbiased form that gives straightforward yes or no answers

18. Automated Annotation TAPoR – Keyword frequencies
Basic article analysis
Shalmaneser Tool (Parsing analysis) – Semantic parsing
Takes sentences and puts them under frames
Helps us understand what types of sentences are used in an article
Articles with heavy judgment/assessment frames are heavily opinionated
Probabilistic Topics Modeling
Unsupervised – LDA – assigns words to a topic, uses different probability sequence to determine what topics are most important in the article, we’ll be able to attach certain topics to certain articles
Supervised – we give the algorithm our annotation form, giving it the topics we are specifically looking for, we will run this and get how frequently the topics are in the articles
End goal - databases will be completely annotated by the computer

19. Data Analysis
Draw qualitative conclusions from trends we will find in our data
Trends will have substantial quantitative backing
Trends over time, sentiment, topics, authors
Compare trends between Russian Literature and Foreign Policy databases
We hope to find a correlation between US reception of Russian authors with US foreign policy
Person 3

20. Conclusion
Foreign novels are an inherent part of United States culture
If one were to ignore the presence of foreign literature in United States politics, then one would be ignoring a major factor that shaped both the citizens and government of the United States
We are pioneering relatively new software and technology in the realm of literary analysis
Over time, our foundation will pave the way to understanding overall patterns in foreign literature reception

21. Timeline for Success Spri ng ‘12 Sum mer ‘12 Fall ‘12 Spri ng ’13
Comple te Websit e
Continu e Literatu re Review
Begin Scanni ng and Annotat ing
Begin Coordi nation with MITH
Sum mer ‘12
Continu e Scanni ng and Annotat ing
Fall ‘12
Prepar e for Junior Colloqu ium
Determ ine method s to quantif y Americ an foreign policies
Spri ng ’13
Present at Underg raduate Resear ch Day
Begin drafting thesis

22. Timeline for Success (cont.)
Sum mer ’13
Conti nue drafti ng thesi s
Fall ’13
Obtai n thesi s feed back from Malli os
Gath er data for forei gn polic y
Draw concl usion s betw een the data base s
Wint er ‘13- 14
Prep are pres entati on for Thesi s Conf eren ce
Revi se and edit thesi s
Spri ng ’14
Pres ent at Seni or Thesi s Conf eren ce

23. References
Chaney, Allison J.B., and David M. Blei. “Visualizing Topic Models.” International AAAI Conference on Social Media and Weblogs. Princeton U Dept. of Computer Science, Web. 15 Mar
Corse, Sarah M. Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Print.
Emerson, Caryl. "Leo Tolstoy On Peace And War." PMLA: Publications Of The Modern Language Association Of America (2009): Academic Search Premier. Web. 15 Mar
Goldfarb, Charles. “William Dean Howells: An American Reaction to Tolstoy.” Comparative Literature Studies 8.4 (1971): JSTOR. Web. 12 Mar
Griswold, Wendy. "The Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies." American Journal of Sociology 92.5 (1987): JSTOR. Web. 13 Sept
Haslam, Paul Alexander. "The Evolution of the Foreign Direct Investment Regime in the Americas." Third World Quarterly 31.7 (2010): Academic Search Premier. Web. 27 Nov
Lee, Lillian, and Bo Pang. “Sentiment of Two Women: Sentiment Analysis and Social Media.” 1900 University Avenue, Cornell University, New York. 22 Mar Lecture.
Ohmann, Richard. "The Shaping Of A Canon: U.S. Fiction, " Critical Inquiry 10.1
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: the Cultural Work of American Fiction, New York: Oxford University Press, Print.
Travis, Rick. "Problems, Politics, and Policy Streams: A Reconsideration US Foreign Aid Behavior toward Africa." International Studies Quarterly 54.3 (2010): Academic Search Premier. Web. 27 Nov
Wang, Xuerui, and Andrew McCallum. “Topics over Time: A Non-Markov Continuous-Time Model of Topical Trends.” U of Massachusetts Dept. of Computer Science, Web. 15 Mar
Watson, Robert P., and Sean McCluskie. "Human Rights Considerations and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Latin American Experience." Social Science Journal 34.2 (1997): Academic Search Premier. Web. 27 Nov
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24. Acknowledgements Dr. Peter Mallios Mr. Tim Hackman
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
Foreign Literatures in America Project
Gemstone Program Staff
15 seconds.

25. Questions?
1-2 minutes.