Uses of "Cyborg" in Popular Criticism & Short-form Fiction

My dataset, “‘Cyborg’ in Popular Criticism & Short-form Fiction,” will examine uses of the term “cyborg” in popular U.S. culture and literary magazines. Why? While I am compelled by criticisms in feminist and disability theory of the use of “cyborg” as a unilateral metaphor for futurity that invokes the disabled body but evades the lived physicality, cost, and potential complications of medical technology, I want to investigate how much the word appears outside of Theory. That is, while more problematic elements of Donna Haraway’s employment of “cyborg” continue (I say optimistically) to fall out of fashion, I am interested in how this term is used in culture writing and criticism that does not necessarily subscribe to a particular Theory label and instead addresses the wider media-interested public.

I make this distinction between Theory and popular criticism with the knowledge that widely circulated culture and literary magazines are not separate from the Academy, but rather exist as a site between the academy and pop culture. I use popular criticism in my title, rather than literary criticism, because much of the analysis and commentary this dataset will highlight extends into film, music, gaming, and general cultural phenomena. I include “fiction” in the title because, while most pieces to be included in this dataset are non-fiction essays or critical pieces, some are fiction, as is the nature of a literary magazine. Further, I understand that “cyborg” in the context of popular media is usually not meant to connote disabled embodiment and often reifies distinctions between human and machine. I invoke disability next to “cyborg” because of how the two have been associated in theory and in mainstream news coverage to refer to adaptive technology, and how the label of cyborg has been (re)claimed by disabled and chronically ill writers (Kafer 107). My primary interest here is more broadly how machines are figured with, next to, and in opposition to the (human) body in the popular critical imagination, whether disability is consciously invoked or not. As such, I will limit my search for the application of “cyborg” to the last ten years (2012-2022) and to the following publications: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and The Nation.

This dataset will take the form of a Spreadsheet (.csv file), with two sheets per literary and/or culture magazine. The first sheet for each publication will include the following fields: “author,” “title,” “date,” “keywords,” “frequency,” “relative context,” and finally, “link.” To clarify, “keywords” will indicate, as the name suggests, the most relevant terms in each piece of writing to its topic. The data from this field will come entirely from what is indicated by Voyant’s algorithm(s) (more on Voyant below). “Frequency” will refer to the number of times “cyborg,” “cyborgs,” “cyborgian,” or “cyborg’s” occurs within each article, essay, or story. “Relative context” will specify to what sort of subject, object, or behavior the term is applied (e.g., relative context = “human resemblance”, part of speech = “noun”).

To obtain the data and metadata for sheet one, I will copy all essay links yielded by my keyword search (for “cyborg”) within each publication website into Voyant. My initial keyword search will be limited to “cyborg” to make the initial data entry process more efficient and avoid duplicates. Voyant will then combine the contents from each piece of writing to produce one larger document, which I can then mine en masse. (Voyant can handle about thirty five links at a time, so rather, in chunks.) I will begin the mining process by searching “cyborg”, this time opening the search up to “cyborgs,” “cyborgian,” or “cyborg’s” (asterisk included because it tells Voyant to locate *any version of the term within the “document terms” tool). This will allow me to see how many times cyborg and its variants appear by document. I will then copy document IDs and frequencies into my Spreadsheet as a starting point, and repreat the mining process for the other fields available from Voyant.¹ Finally, I will search “cyborg*” within the “contexts” tool to determine “relative context” for each document.

The second sheet for each publication will reproduce all words that appear near or next to “cyborg” and the number of times they appear. The fields here will be taken from Voyant: “collocate” (terms that appear near or next to “cyborg”) and “count” (the number of times they occur near or next to “cyborg”). To get this information from Voyant into my dataset, I will simply export the data yielded by my keyword search within the “collocates” tool, again, as tab separated values and copy them over to Spreadsheets. (Citations for the data yielded by Voyant will be included in the final, published dataset.) I intend here to provide a summary of frequent associations to “cyborg” respective to each magazine.

Through this dataset as a whole, I aim to make visible where and in what general context “cyborg” features in the popular literary and cultural imagination, to provide myself and other researchers with the ability to investigate applications of the term further. Due to the fact that the essays reflected in this dataset are not in the public domain, however, I will necessarily avoid original phrasing and complete summary in contextualization. In effect, the final product will likely yield a set of critical reading suggestions rather than a set of claims. What I mean by this is that the dataset will offer places to look in order to analyze the way technology is figured with, against, and next to the body in mainstream criticism, and to ultimately ask whether critics and fiction writers have found a way to address adaptive and augmentative technologies and the humans who use them as something other than heroic, metaphoric, or intentionally cryptic. While the creation of this dataset will be quite labor intensive on the front end, its maintenance should not be. Because the magazines included here publish no faster than on a weekly basis, and because of the relative simplicity of each field to be included in this dataset, it seemingly should not be very labor intensive to continue building the dataset as new publications that refer to a/the/being “cyborg” circulate.

While there are many compelling comparative, qualitative studies related to race, gender, and embodiment across media that incorporate AI (see, for example, Whiteness in AI by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal or Gender and Environment in Science Fiction by Bridgitte Barclay (ed)), it is hard to find comparable computational studies that address the use of “cyborg” within mainstream media and criticism. The use of “cyborg” in culture writing, and short-form fiction, though, might be compared against the use of artificial intelligence in science and speculative fiction literature and film, for which there exist fairly extensive online databases (see linked). Even then, however, further mining would be required to locate specific applications of “cyborg” within the media said databases enumerate, and perhaps more importantly, to relocate this inquiry into science fiction alone would be to evade how writers understand the place of body-machine interaction in the real socio-poltical sphere. Thus, the existence of this dataset might also beg the question: is there enough attention being paid to technologically aided, rehabilitated, or augmented bodies in literature outside of popular science fiction? And/or when we, as literary critics, talk about cyborgian figures in speculative fiction, do we focus more on the affordances and consequences of technology in general than who is being capacitated or debilitated in the process of biotechnical intervention and how? Finally, with respect to future adaptation, the steps necessary for this particular dataset could be repurposed to create a separate directory that reflects the use of cyborg/cyborgianism by self-identifying disabled authors exclusively. Such a product would facilitate an amplification of disabled authors, as disabledwriters.com beautifully does here. In sum, I want this dataset to help generate an examination of the intersections of “cyborg” across media and critical fields.

Keywords and Title: Bottom left - > “Documents” tool - > Down arrow next to “Title” - > Under “Columns,” select: “Title” and “Keywords” - > Export as tab separated values - > copy into Spreadsheets

Sources Cited: Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip, Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 107-115.

Sample of dataset: here.

Tools used: Sinclair, Stéfan and Geoffrey Rockwell. “Documents.” Voyant Tools. 2022. Web. 8 Apr 2022. https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=cca05f5ce85ce8875437e8e8f6ea97cd&stopList=keywords-8d1f837d9552cdb624b0f94772287472&query=new&query=cyborg*&view=Documents

Sinclair, Stéfan and Geoffrey Rockwell. “Collocates.” Voyant Tools. 2022. Web. 8 Apr 2022. https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=cca05f5ce85ce8875437e8e8f6ea97cd&query=cyborg*&panels=cirrus,reader,trends,summary,contexts&view=CorpusCollocates