“How we do things with words: Analyzing text as social and cultural data” (Nguyen, Dong, Liakata, DeDeo, Eisenstein, Mimno, Tromble, Winters) asks us to consider the “Background Concept” —the messy complicated nuanced region of knowledge related to your area of interest— and the “Systemized Concept”—the boiled down quantifiable expression of that tangle that can be used to slice through your data for specific insight. In other words, to use digital text analysis effectively you must chip away at a great stone of knowledge until you have an arrowhead that will hit a small target. They make the point, of course, that how you hone this language becomes more difficult the more nuanced your subject matter. Spam, they say is a bit easier to chunk out into neat categories—offering a finite goal and measurably predictable tendencies. 

Discussions of gender, on the other had, are quite the opposite. We get into trouble when we imagine that there is a single answer to most questions of human experience. Compare any two people and you get a different perspective, no matter what they may appear to have in common. Two siblings from the same family will have different insight, different struggles, different relationships within the rest of the family. Two women living in seemingly the same society will have different perspectives and experiences. And yet there has emerged a pattern of treatment towards women as a whole that is undeniable, despite uncovering the faulty reporting and interpretation of earlier scientific studies that exaggerated biological differences between the sexes (Eckert, Penelope, McConnell-Ginet). So undeniable is this pattern of treatment that a chapter entitled Introduction to Gender includes a list of adjectives traditionally attributed to each gender—ex. weak (f) vs. strong (m)—and anticipates it being familiar to readers. 

As conducive to creating a “Systemized Concept” as this list may be, it ignores a myriad of influences on our understanding of every manner of our identities. When these same authors later insist on inserting what feels like a footnote that accidentally wandered into the text to acknowledge the white centered approach to their delineation of gender norms, it becomes very clear that their list of descriptors, so readily assumed as familiar, come with a great many caveats. Ethnicity, geography, and class are considerably large influences on how we express our gender, never mind the cultures expressed in every community circle we participate in—starting with our families.  How then do we quantify gender expression in a reliable way? Is that a valid query, or does this reinforce gender norms due to rigid definitions of gender expression to query data? 

Ahmed, in Living Feminist Life, invites us to confront internalized sexist assumptions on a daily basis. You first must, of course, teach yourself to be aware of them, as they’ve likely hidden themselves among all other reasonable cultural practices due to sheer ubiquity. This is  an ongoing personal practice, but, as Ahmed argues, the big banner conversations must happen, but the changing of culture one interaction at a time is important.

This can prove more difficult than it seems, when we consider the human desire to make things digestible and manageable. Systems that we are familiar with can be hard to discern. Feminist advocates pointing to larger number of women speakers at global multi stakeholder conferences on the governance of the internet as a sign of progress (A History of Feminist Engagement with Development and Digital Technologies | Association for Progressive Communications. ) is a prime example. By choosing to assume that women will always support women and not be guided by other cultural, political, and ecomonic influences that shape their perspectives, it’s as though the authors of  failed to question their own internalized assumptions about what motivates women as a whole. 

So where does that leave scholars who are left to to try and comb out the shifting expressions of interconnected  influences on their data come up with a “systemized concept?” This, in the end, reinforces the idea that technology used to investigate culturally complex subjects should be used as a tool to ask questions formulated in a finite context. Technology would be most effective as a probe to gather intel, but not, in this case, as the synthesizer.