big feet, small feet, male feet, female feet

I can’t say that when I read the entire Harry Potter series I really cared about the very obvious gender inequality or the many references to feet, but can you blame me? I was like in the 5th grade and the only reason I read those books is to get a lot of reading points for the end-of-year raffle and the monthly pizza parties.

BUT I DO HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE!

I didn’t actually read all the Harry Potter books. I read the first 5, the just took the tests on the last two just to get those points. And to be honest, I passed both those tests without even reading them (was it because Harry Potter became very predictable? Or was I just that smart?). Irregardless (yes I know that’s not a word but I will use it as I please), returning to this book series almost ten years later has shown me that as a child, I really cared about pizza, and there is so much I missed from the book that most of the kids who read it (probably the majority of the books’ intended audience) also missed.

But I were to read the Harry Potter series one more time (I never actually would), I probably would never realize any of the gender inequalities, numerous references to feet, or any other abstract theme of the books. Being in a humanities class, however, I get to see all these things with the help of in class discussions and assigned readings without even reading those books! For example, in the paper “Representations of Gender and Agency in the Harry Potter Series” written by Sally Hunt, she was able to gather and compile data that allowed us muggles to see a side of Harry Potter that isn’t obvious (2015). However, her research could have also found things that weren’t even intended by the author, and that is where this idea of studying humanities gets interesting. Hunt’s methods of text analysis not only tell us about the gender issues in the wizarding world, but also give us clues as to the types of gender issues 20 years ago.

Going back to probably my first blog post, this means of textual analysis almost perfectly encapsulates my definition of what digital humanities is: understanding human culture with the help of computational power. What amazes me more is that all this information about the past could be found just be looking at an author’s word choice and finding the meaning of it all.

Sources

Hunt, Sally. 2015. “Representations of Gender and Agency in the Harry Potter Series.” In Corpora and Discourse Studies, edited by Paul Baker and Tony McEnery, 266–84. Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics. Palgrave Macmillan UK. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137431738_13