Part 3. FLOAT Case Studies
3.6 Short Stories & 100 Anthologies
Short Stories & 100 Anthologies
Project Rationale: This project considers the circulation history of Black short stories. There is no shortage of short fiction. In one hundred anthologies published since 1925, there are a total of 632 unique short stories by 297 different black writers. Among those compositions included in collections though, editors published just one story by 181 writers. It is rare that a single story appears three or more times across 100 anthologies.
Data Story Description: This visualization illustrates the extent to which specific Black writers are routinely included in various collections and Using the filter, users can determine what type of anthologies republish the select works and how many stories by Black authors are included across 100 collections.
Formulate – A Research Question
Exploratory Question:
- How many short story writers are anthologized?
Explanatory Question (I revised my research questions during the analyzing process):
- How frequently are writers republished in anthologies?
- What anthology types—and what stories—are writers included across nine anthology types?
- In what years are there notable peaks with stories being published?
Locate – A Data Source
For this project, I used The Black Short Story Dataset – Vol. 1. This pre-assembled dataset is published on the subverse of the Texas Data Repository. The “Black Studies Data Verse” has datasets related to an assortment of topics in Black literature and Black studies in general. The information is already cleaned and organized in a coherent manner.
You can access this information by going to this website here.
Organize – Your Data
This information already came organized. It has a data dictionary that explains the organization and components of the dataset. The dataset has 15 main categories: Anthology Publication Year, Anthology Type, Anthology Title, Collection Type, Source Title, Source Genre, Original Publication Year, Publication Decade, Author, Author Birth Year, Author Birth Decade, Author Gender, Anthology Section Header, Anthology Edition, Anthology Editors.
The structure of the dataset is defined in the accompanying data dictionary.
Analyze – Your Data
I used Tableau Public to analyze my data. I began playing around the different visualizations to see how often writers had been republished across anthologies. I noticed there was a small number of writers who are frequently republished across the entire dataset. Anthologists, in a sense, tokenized certain short story writers.
I also noticed that different anthologies published only certain types of writers. The most frequently republished writers are more likely to appear across several anthology types. Certain special collections, sometimes, published several stories by a single writer.
My analysis lead me to revise my research questions:
- How frequently are writers republished in anthologies?
- What anthology types—and what stori