Looking From a Distance: Digital Humanities Insights into the Field of Feminist Utopian Criticism

Abstract

In this paper, we aimed to explore how digital humanities can contribute to a better understanding of the construction of scientific disciplines. We specifically focused on the field of utopian studies and within it, feminist criticism, using metadata from the field's largest bibliographic database. The Lyman Tower Sargent Bibliography includes over 19,000 critical references, around 70% of which are written in English. We conducted the statistics and text analysis in R. Results showed that works mostly address literature. Women related topics, despite representing a relatively small part of the corpus, rank as the third most important topic and are integrated into the most complex thematic constellation, which connects, for example, the themes of science fiction and the future. This work is significant because it shows that digital humanities can help understand heuristics, imbalances, and trends in the construction of repositories and the fields they aim to represent.