Laura Freshcoln spends several hours each day unbinding picture books and novels alongside five other students, Temple faculty and library staff.
This small and tedious effort the student workers put into unbinding and analyzing the books plays an important role in a much larger, in-depth research project — Piloting the Representation Lab: A Case Study in Banned Books.
“Sometimes it goes pretty fast, but it really depends on the size of the book, some take longer, like the bigger books,” said Freshcoln, a junior art history major and student worker for the project.
Last October, the research team’s leader, Laura McGrath and co-leader Alex Wermer-Colan, were invited to apply for a grant by The Mellon Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the humanities. The two secured a $200,000 grant for their project, which focuses on expanding the definition of educational fair use and analyzing patterns among banned books.
Book banning has been a growing movement in the United States in recent years, gaining significant attention and sparking debates among school boards nationwide. This movement primarily centers on the contentious removal or restriction of certain books from school curricula and libraries.
Even before the surge in book bans, literature had been disproportionately skewed toward white male characters, leaving children from other backgrounds underrepresented, but studies have shown that more inclusive and diverse content can have a positive impact on all children, according to Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Some argue the banning is necessary to protect students from potentially explicit content, while others assert book bans infringe upon intellectual freedom and stifle diverse perspectives within education.
THE GRANT
The team is working with lawyers and an authors’ organization to expand the definition of educational fair use under The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and develop best practices for text mining e-books within the bounds of the law.
By expanding The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the team and future researchers will be able to study and analyze digitized banned books published after 1923.
The second portion of the project will examine any existing patterns in banned books through text mining, which identifies textual patterns and trends within unstructured data. The team has begun this process with physical copies of books and hopes to utilize digital copies in the future, if The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is expanded.
The team is also examining how marginalized groups are depicted and how representation varies across different genres and audiences. This is done to understand any patterns in current or anticipated banned books.
McGrath, an English professor, and Wermer-Colan, the interim academic director of Temple Libraries’ Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio, wanted the project to benefit the public in some way. By working to expand The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, more researchers will be able to study modern text by using text-mining. This will allow for more comprehensive research to be done as digital copies of modern-text would become accessible.
They also hope their gathered information on banned books will benefit teachers and students nationwide; the team wants to establish data that will help break down the stigmas of banned books.
STUDYING THE BANNED BOOKS
Students, like Stefan, work on the project and analyze different components of the physical
book itself. They examine the word choice and the appearance of the book’s cover and spine, and can only analyze these aspects after the unbinding process.
The unbinding process includes removing the spine and the cover from the pages, allowing the student workers to preserve them for their own research. They then look at the data they’ve collected on the scanned book covers to determine how “judging a book by its cover” plays into a book being banned.
The student workers begin by unbinding the books for scanning and digitization. After, they use natural language processing, network analysis and data visualization to uncover patterns like what word choice is used to describe characters of color and the allocation of dialogue based on gender identity.
“Across the country, a lot of librarians and teachers are having their trust taken away, parents seem to be distrusting that teachers and librarians are assigning appropriate books for their kids,” Wermer-Colan said. “I hope what we can show in part is, across these books, it turns out the vast majority of them it’s not unreasonable for them to contain certain text.”
The student workers have hundreds of books left to scan, and then the analysis of emerging patterns found in the data can begin. They hope to surmise whether the texts reveal trends about identity, sexuality or race.
Although the research is focused on two major interests — expanding The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and breaking down stigmas associated with certain books — the data they collect throughout this process will help many future researchers.
“We kind of want to remain open to what we might find and I think the research will probably be ongoing for multiple years and we hope to have some preliminary results this fall,” Wermer-Colan said. “I expect this dataset will be a really rich set of materials for us to explore a lot of different questions about contemporary young adult literature today.”
THE ISSUE OF BANNING BOOKS
Certain books are stigmatized because conservative groups, like Moms For Liberty, have concerns about protecting children from controversial content, but banning them can restrict freedom of expression and intellectual exploration, according to the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University.
“We saw addressing the current state of book banning as one way that we could contribute to a public conversation,” McGrath said. “Our research could be beneficial both for addressing this issue of copyright for other scholars, but also beneficial for a larger public conversion around censorship, around free access to ideas and really around representation.”
The team wants to have quantitative data proving that many banned books actually aren’t inappropriate, Wermer-Colan said.
From July 2021 to June 2022, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans lists 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 unique book titles. Temple’s research team is utilizing 2,000 books after PEN America recommended a list.
“The children’s books especially have been super interesting to me because more often than not, they’re just good representations of children who are not white or cis,” said SaraGrace Stefan, a fifth-year Ph.D. student studying literature and a research assistant on the project. “So oftentimes those books that you wouldn’t think would be problematic or controversial are somehow still banned.”
Books are now becoming “shadow banned,” meaning educators are seeing their colleagues being punished or at risk of losing their jobs because of certain books, McGrath said. Teachers are then not making those books available to students to avoid being at the center of political debate.
Some of the most frequently banned books from the 2022-23 school year include, “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe, “This Book is Gay” by Juno Dawson and “Flamer” by Mike Curato, according to PEN America. Almost all books on the list feature themes of identity, race and sexuality.
FOR THE SAKE OF RESEARCHERS
McGrath and Wermer-Colan hope to expand The Digital Millennium Copyright Act for the benefit of fellow researchers. Studying books on a massive and modern scale is expensive, as books published after the 1923 threshold period are not available for fair use online.
The threshold for copyright protection moves up each year, so books from 1924 will become available for the public domain in 2024, McGrath said. A significant portion of the grant was used to purchase modern physical books, as the threshold hindered researchers.
“If you are studying anything after 1923, you really can’t do this work, it’s basically impossible to do this work,” McGrath said. “Computationally and legally, you can’t teach students with these sorts of texts.”
By expanding The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, more studies can be conducted on modern text, as researchers would be able to utilize digital copies of books instead of having to purchase them all physically.
“Our hope as researchers is to build much larger datasets and more data sets that represent the parts of contemporary culture that are often overlooked and ignored and can testify to the diversity of contemporary culture,” Wermer-Colan said. “So yeah, I think there’s a lot of reasons to be optimistic.”
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