Absolutely Not the Roaring ‘20s#
In January of 2020, my coworker asked all the staff at our library to share what we thought the 2020s might be called (think “Roaring ‘20s”). I don’t remember what I suggested, and a couple of months later when we shut down to the public due to COVID-19, things felt a little too real to assign a silly adjective to the collective horror of a global pandemic anyway.
But here we are again. Of the 37 pieces in my corpus, a whopping 11 were written in 2020. Why? Well, first, I was writing a lot more in general, as 2020 marked the start of my third year as a freelance sportswriter; but second, like many people, it turned out, 2020 offered a period of reflection, righteous anger, and coming out as transgender.[1] Third, though, was a combination of these: Substack was rising in popularity as a personal newsletter platform, and the loud vulnerability that 2020 fostered was a perfect outlet for people like me to explore themselves by taking their modest audiences through every stage.[2]
Using the topics generated from Topic Modeling Tool, I compared the prevalence of Topics 1-9 within each of the time-based buckets I’d created in order to see when each topic peaked. (Since Topic 10 was assigned with every single piece, it’s not represented here. Again, I’ll take another look at Topic 10 at the end.) Unsurprisingly, Topic 1 (“COVID-19 pandemic”) was assigned to about three-fourths of the pieces from this period. Perhaps also unsurprisingly, Topic 7 (“my history playing music”) cratered. By 2020, I hadn’t been in a formal musical ensemble since 2013, but I also wasn’t writing about music.
What stands out most to me is Topic 8 (“considerations of gender, pronouns, being nonbinary”). On their own, many of the terms that contribute to this topic — people, woman, writers, posted — don’t seem to have anything to do with what I decided to call the topic. My decision was influenced by the words that stood out — pronouns, gender, nonbinary. That’s why when I saw that the difference between this topic’s prevalence in the 2015-2017 bucket versus the 2020 bucket appeared — to put it in technical terms — pretty negligible, I was initially rattled. Did I know I was nonbinary in 2015? How had I both written about it and suppressed it? And then I took another look at the topic and went, ah, no, it’s just much more generic on the word level, since I had interpreted it through the lens of knowing what I had written about. (Of course, both my friends who reviewed the topics — and know I’m nonbinary — also picked up on the gender stuff. Good for them.)
Questions/Thoughts for Further Study#
Topic 8 might not strictly be about gender stuff, but I’m still interested to know if I can operationalize ~finding myself~. Embracing my gender (or lack thereof) is one big part of this, but how else have I grown and changed, and how might this be evident in this corpus?
Is there a more faithful interpretation of Topic 8 than just rounding up to “gender stuff”?
Of course, knowing what I know about myself, I’m interested in how Topic 1 and Topic 8 work together. The simple answer could just be that my corpus doesn’t reflect all aspects of my life (and what a conclusion to come to this late!).