Welcome back to the last of a series of posts for my digital humanities project! I know, some of you are probably sad that it has come to an end (most of you don’t really care).But is this really the end? This project has inspired me to write more. Who knows I might even write more on this blog about things unrelated to English 205 after finishing this Project. So Thank You Ms. Najla, for sort of forcing us to create our very own unique blogs.
Enough with the sensitive talk and let’s get back to where we left off last time. For those of you who forgot or have never read my previous posts, you could check out what I’ve been discussing through my first blog post or second blog post.
Here’s a quick review (if you’re too lazy to click on those hyperlinks…don’t worry we all are)
The purpose of this project is to research Books read in Lebanese High schools over space, time and emotion. My classmates and I conducted interviews with different students across Lebanon. On the basis of our findings in our spreadsheet i analayzed the following 3 ideas in my previous blog post:
- Title of book vs. Free time/ School Time
- Emotion vs. Year of Graduation
- Emotion vs. Free time/ School Time
My classmates and I used Carto and Palladio to visualize the data through maps and networks. Although I was lead to many findings , I came up with even more questions in the process.
Knowing that time prevented me from dealing with all of those questions, I decided to narrow my focus on one main concept.
So here it is: *drum roll please*
On what basis do schools choose the books they put in their high school Curriculum?
Now before you get too excited, I just want to let you know that we definitely won’t find the solid and correct answer to this question. However, we will be doing a lot of analysis to get a better understanding of this topic. The issues that will be focused on are:
- Book Reviews Vs. How frequent they’re given
- Does a school give many books with same author?
- Diversity of Books (If same schools in Lebanon are giving same books to read)
- Any Regional Authors?
Under Diversity of books, the following topics will be examined:
- Emotion attributed with common books read in different schools
- Genre of common books read in different schools
- Year of publication of common books read in different schools
Book Reviews Vs. How Frequently They’re Given
Some people might be surprised to know that books are given ratings just as movies are. I mean we all hold that one book and quickly either turn the pages or flip to the back to check out the reviews by “ The New York Times” or even by your favorite author.I came across http://www.goodreads.com which is a website that instead of just giving a book some reviews, it gives it a rating out of 5 stars.
Have you ever thought that maybe just maybe your teacher in school saw a high rating for a certain book and decided to give it to you guys to read it? Well if you haven’t, now you could think about that. Now, don’t get me wrong I didn’t choose to analyze this whole book review thing just because of that specific question. I mean it just seems so natural for books that are read in schools to have “high ratings”. Lets see if that’s really the case in Lebanese High Schools or not. I realized that the best way this would work is if I chose random books from random high schools throughout Lebanon and then checked the books’ ratings on the website mentioned above.
Name Of High School Title of Book Star Rating (over 5)
International School of Choueifat To Kill a Mockingbird 4.25
Al Ahlieh School Petty The Nation 4.37
Houssam Eddine Harriri High School The Stranger 3.95
Grand Lycee Franco-Libanais The Shining 4.16
Saint Mary’s Orthodox College I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud 3.98
National Evangelical Institute The Prince 3.76
The Lebanese Preparatory School A Child Called It 4.08
Brummana High School The Catcher in the Rye 3.78
Rawdah High School A Clockwise Orange 3.97
American Community School Lord of the Rings 4.46
I chose these completely randomly. The first thing that comes to light is that none of the ratings are below 3. In fact, all are above 3.7 .From this analysis, one could argue that school tend to require readings of “the best” books either directly or indirectly.
Does a school give many books with same author?
In trying to answer the main question which is : “On what basis do schools choose the books they put in their high school curriculum”, I tried to figure out of the author plays a role in the books they choose. I wanted to know if a particular Lebanese school puts many books written by the same author in its curriculum. To do this I first had to know if there were particular authors with many different books in our data base. The results obtained are shown below.
The above are the authors who have more than one book from our information gathered through the interviews. Each author is connected to his/her books.
Next, I cross-referenced those authors and books with High Schools. To my surprise, after many searches, i only found one school that listed two books of the same author.Could you try to guess the name of the author? ….. William Shakespeare it is!
American Community School had two of William Shakespeare’s works in its curriculum: Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.
The below album shows some other findings before I got to this result. None of these schools have 2 books from the same author.Click on an image to get a better view.
Any Regional Authors?
I searched the whole Authors entries in our database to check if there are any regional authors or if all are foreign. By regional authors I mean authors of an Arab nationality.The mere fact that I’m questioning whether there are any regional writers at all means that there is something wrong with the system. Why isn’t the question the other way around? Why isn’t it “Are there any foreign authors in database or all they all regional authors?” Or does it really matter? Some students might identify and connect more with an author who is from the same nationality and has the same cultural background. Other students might find foreign writings as an escape from their culture and find themselves better identifying with those foreign writings. The crazy thing is that nowadays we could easily find translations of a book in any language. So why limit our boarders?
Out of all the authors listed in our database, I was only able to find 4 regional authors (listed below with a brief description of each author):
Tawfiq Yusuf ‘Awwad: a Lebanese writer and diplomat
Gibran Khalil Gibran : a Lebanese-American artist, poet, and writer of the New York Pen League
Amin Maalouf : a Lebanese-born French author
Khaled Hosseini: an Afghan-born American novelist and physician.
Nujood Ali: co-writer and central figure in Yemen’s movement against forced marriage and child marriage.
Because of this research i came across the name of Nujood Ali and while searching a bit about her, I found out that she has a very interesting story to tell and went through a lot through her life. She was married at a VERY early age and got divorced at the age of TEN. I might even read her autobiography when I get the chance. See, this is a perk about this project: discovering new things.
Diversity of Books
First I wanted to know if and why the same books are being read in high schools throughout Lebanon. I was able to list, through Palladio, all the different schools mentioned in our interviews and the number of times they were entered.
We have a total of 86 different schools listed in our database, with Brummana High School being the most frequent one listed to Al Makassed High School being one of the least entered (only once).
The map below shows the different schools mentioned in our database and the books students read in them. My aim in creating this network is to find the common links between schools and see if those links are a lot. The darker nodes are the schools while the lighter nodes are the title of the books. The first thing that grabbed my attention is that The Kite Runner is linked between so many schools such as Greenfield College, The Lebanese Preparatory School, Brummana High School, and Beirut Evangelical School for Boys and Girls. Later I realized that through Palladio, I could list the most frequent books mentioned in our database. Using the networks shown below, I was able to figure out which schools these books were read in.
I made lists of the most frequent books that were read by numerous schools and the name of those schools:
1984: Sagesse HighSchool, Christian Teaching Insitute,International School of Choueifat, Brummana High School, Lycee National,International College
Anna Karenina:The Lebanese Preparatory School, Broummana High School, Sidon Secondary Public School, Brummana High School, Amjad,Saint Mary’s Orthodox College, Lycee Abdel Kader, Collège Notre Dame de Jamhour, Lycee Franco-libanaise
Romeo and Juliet: American Community School, Rawdah High School, International College, Greenfield College, Sagesse High School, The Lebanese Preparatory School
The Alchemist: American Community School, Rawdah High School, Ashbal Al Sahel High School, Le Lycee National
Macbeth: Brummana High School, Rawdah High School, Adma International School, Beirut Evangelical school for boys and Girls, International School of Choueifat
The Tell-Tale Heart: The International School of Choueifat, Jesus and Mary School, Sagesse High School, Al Bayader School
Le Malade Immaginaire/The Imaginary Invalid: Grand Lycee Franco-Libanais, Lycée Abdelkader, Berro Elhussein, Makassed High School
So the answer to our question is yes. There are numerous books being read by different schools across Lebanon. But what makes them so special? What makes so many schools choose those same books? Is it that most schools in Lebanon care about the emotion brought with those books? Or is it that they care about the genre or date of publication of these particular books?
Each one of those factors will be compared among these books to try to figure it all out.
1.Emotion
I first started with emotion. Listed below are the emotions students felt about those “common” books.
1984: Paranoid, Interest , Thought provoking, deep, dark, complex, Boredom , Interest, Overwhelmed, Very influential
Anna Karenina : Bored, loved it, Boredom, Very interested, interesting, Annoyance, Annoyed, Sadness and Anger, Interesting
Romeo and Juliet : Love, Sad, Sad, anxious, Depression, Depressing, loved it, Loved it, depressing, Interest, Sadness
The Alchemist: Thoughtful, Anticipation , Enlightenment, Anticipation, Awareness
Macbeth: Thoughtful, Intrigued , Amazement, interest, Weird
The Tell-Tale Heart: Very interested, Fear, interest, Suspenseful, interesting, Surprise, interest
Le Malade Immaginaire/The Imaginary Invalid: boring, Distraction, Amazed , Ecstasy, Joy
When looking at the emotions different students attribute with these books, don’t forget that students may have contradicting views about the same book. I have discussed this in my previous blog post.
I put some of the common emotions between these books in different colors so that things could be more clear (and more colorful!)
Almost every one of these books is described as being interesting by different students. The second most common emotion is Thought-provoking (or thoughtful). It is very interesting to see that Romeo and Juliet had very contradicting views. Some “loved it” while others found it to be depressing. Some students also described some of these books with “boredom, but those were very few. This surprised me to be honest, because I expected that most of the emotions would be “boredom” since the choice of book wasn’t theirs since they were forced to read those books for their high school curriculum.
So this raises the question: Are MOST schools in Lebanon focusing on the way the books make students feel? Are they mostly choosing books that they know students would find “Intresting”? According, to the results I have above the answer is most likely yes. However, those results aren’t enough to make such a strong conclusion since our database only consists of 300 students out of the millions of students in Lebanon. So I guess we’ll never really know unless our database reaches millions of entries. Unless, a student majoring in statistics wants to argue with me, I’ll stop there.
For the inquisitive ones: What’s very interesting is that in my previous blog, the analysis showed that most of the emotions attributed with books read during school time are “sad”. This doesn’t make our results here false, because an important detail you shouldn’t forget is that these books are the only some of the most common books read between schools in Lebanon, not ALL books read in schools in Lebanon. Remember we’re trying to figure out if schools in Lebanon have the same taste in books. Since we found out what some of other common books are, we checked if the emotions attributed with them are also common.
Andrew Simmons is a teacher who expresses her concern about the way High Schools are dealing with student’s emotions after reading certain books. She wrote an article on theatlantic.com She believes that main focus on the litterute itself and that the student’s emotions are ignored, which could be an issue.
She states:
“In my experience teaching and observing other teachers, students spend a lot of time learning academic skills and rarely even talk about the emotional reactions they may have to what they read—even when stories, as they often do, address dark themes” – Andrew Simmons
That’s something interesting to think about…
Here’s the link to her article if you’re interested in reading more about it: Link
2.Year of Publication
Now, we are going to check if the reason these books are in common throughout many schools in Lebanon is because of their year of publication.
Listed below is the date of publication of each of these books:
1597 : Romeo and Juliet
1623: Macbeth
1843: The Tell-Tale Heart
1877: Anna Karenina
1949: 1949
1988: The Alchemist
2003: The Kite Runner
It’s quite easy to notice that most of these books have been published a very very long time ago. In fact, the most recent publication date is 2003! From this we could deduce that most of the books in common throughout schools in Lebanon share something in common: they’ve been published many many years ago.
3.Genre
Finally,we’re going to check whether these common books are of the same genre.
To see the different genres of the books, I filtered all of the books and chose only what I want on Palladio. You could see from the table above, that different genres were given to the same book, which will make this analysis harder. For future research , I suggest that the genre options are limited so that the same entries of genre are made for the same book.
Back to the point:
The Genres of these readings differ from Utopian and dystopian fiction to Gothic fiction, tragedy, Literary Realism, comedy and adventure. Both Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth are tragic, while others have diverse genres. Romeo and Juliet and Le Malade Immaginaire are the only plays in these readings, while the rest are novels. Does that mean that teachers prefer to give novels to students to read instead of plays? If so, then why are so many schools making sure their students read Romeo and Juliet? Could it be that it’s because it was written by the famous William Shakespeare?
In my first post, I mentioned that adding even more entries to our data sheet would be helpful for future research. After the three blog posts and getting more familiar with Palladio, I came up with even more and hopefully beneficial entries to future databases that would facilitate analysis and research. It would be nice to know the student’s first language and in which language the book was read. We could also add both the student’s and author’s nationality. Most importantly, however, something that I’ve mentioned above is the GENRE ISSUE. It should be made more clear of what type of words to put in the genre entry as very different terminologies are being used.Also, maybe even have an online survey (check the one I did in my second post) if student’s are short on time.
oh and for future students dealing with this project, THERE IS A FILTER IN PALLDIO. USE THAT. IT WILL MAKE YOUR LIVES SO MUCH EASIER. TRUST ME ON THIS, OKAY? I only found out about that at the very end.
Whether you’ve learned something or not from these posts, I hope I didn’t bore you and that you at least remember one thing out of all the things I babbled about. I, for one, know that I’ve gained a deeper understanding of the literature in Lebanese Schools and know that I’ve gained so much experience and knowledge from this Digital Project.
Till we meet again,
Malak
Etherial Words 