Background
There is a famous quote by Isaac Newton that states “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Last semester in ENVS 160, we began our journey by delving into several environmental classics and contrasted these “classic” concepts with more contemporary works. We found that environmental thought has evolved a great deal from these classic, fundamental, even foundational texts written during an outburst of environmental crisis speculation in the 1960’s and 1970’s. To better understand the connections between classic, contemporary, and related texts, we utilized social network analysis with the software Gephi. Using Gephi, we were able to discover patterns of citation within the works of literature that inform our understanding of “environmental studies” and “environmentalism.”
Procedure
We began by choosing an environmental classic appearing on lists of “environmental” literature from Powell’s, Goodreads, and our own Lewis & Clark ENVS list of environmental classics. I chose The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture by Wendell Berry because it was a text I have encountered in various academic and non-academic contexts. We then turned to Google Scholar and gathered data about the number of citations our texts have accrued, 10 the specific texts that appear in the citation network of each classic, and compiled this information into a shared spreadsheet. In our network, the classics were “nodes” and their citation were the “edges.” We imported the data into Gephi and created a visualization of the entire citation network. I looked at patterns of citation between classics and non-classics and well as patterns of different type of texts (book, article, etc.)
Results
Using Gephi, I was able to visualize several patterns from this text citation network. The blue nodes are the classic environmental texts and the red nodes are the non-classic environmental texts which are clustered around the classics because they have cited certain classics. I noticed that there was a large cluster in the middle with most of the classics and their cited works. Also, there were several clusters that were completely self-contained, meaning that the works that cited those environmental classics did not cite any of the other environmental classics. Also, the nodes were sized on a scale, meaning that the works with the most citations (both classic and non-classic) were bigger that those with less citations. Most of the nodes are the same size, however several of the non-classics were larger and thus, had been cited the most.
Discussion
Because some of the texts were clustered in the center and some of the texts were completely separate, I wondered what conceptual similarities the big cluster shares. The classics in that cluster included Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, The Population Bomb by Paul and Anne Erlich, The Limits to Growth, and several other very well known works. These classics were published across many decades in the 20th Century and don’t share a common time period, nor are all of of these texts non-fiction. These texts vary greatly by topic, ranging from pesticides, Neo-Malthusian population fears, global warming, critiques of capitalism, philosophical fiction, to gender in ecology. Several of these classics share a rather alarmist tone, warning people that actions have dire consequences which pose massive threats to the world as we know it. However, without extensive research, I don’t know whether the non-classics in this cluster agree with or refute the ideas of the classics, and this aspect would greater inform us of how “environmental” writing speaks to each other.
The data we collected was far from a complete or random sample of the “environmental” literature. We had too many nodes to truly understand some of the specific patterns within certain types of texts and their cited works, for instance “environmental” fiction or agriculturally-focused texts. Additionally, our data was too haphazard to get a complete picture of all “environmental literature,” particularly because of our loose definition of “classic.” For further research, a more focused approach and established definitions may reveal more useful patterns.