Abstract of the presentation 
The project sets forth computationally mediated techniques that I developed to study the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois, the U.S. civil rights activist and scholar. With such techniques I examine as a case study his formulation of "democratic despotism", a concept that highlights his argument that some aspects of democracy could be promoted within colonizing countries which nevertheless exploited peoples of color around the world. As a distinct phrase "democratic despotism" occurs only in texts of 1915 and 1930. But via DH-based conceptual analysis we can locate the synonymous and metaphorical ways by which Du Bois expressed the idea in different works. For example, in a 1924 essay he wrote: "most modern men of the masses believe the advancement of civilization necessarily involves slavery, lust and rapine in Africa." Other scholarship on Du Bois does not trace his auto-intertextuality by DH means.

My poster presents the work flow and techniques by which I uncovered the other inflections of the concept among Du Bois's works. Apropos the poster's title, I apply regular expressions to a corpus via a concordancer. The techniques combine close and distant reading techniques, melding attention to the details of an author's word usage with the capability of accessing a large corpus. My corpus consists of about 230 documents selected non-representatively from among Du Bois's 2000-plus writings. The poster presents the specially crafted regexes and a discussion of the results regarding how he intricately conveyed his idea of "democratic despotism".

Keywords: Regular expressions; close reading; distant reading; W.E.B. Du Bois; democratic despotism
My biography and C.V. (with a list of my other publications) are located on this site.