About this collection

The purpose of SF-canids is to create a digital collection of metadata to compliment my dissertation project on dogs in speculative fiction from mid-twentieth and twenty-first century literature. The dataset includes an aggregated version of independent blogger Dave Hooks’ list and my own list of speculative fiction texts that feature canids (“Dogs and Speculative”). I will also use the DogSpeak dataset, Stanford Dogs, and quotes from the stories to layer real-dogs onto digital space to reflect upon human-dog relations outside the simulacrum. My digital approach is twofold; first, a collection of tabular metadata categorizing SF dogs/wolves/hybrids by type and relation to each fiction story; secondly, an interactive gamified exploration to answer the question who is a dog anyway? using the three sorts of data mentioned above that would otherwise remain uncombined and collectively untheorized. The digital output I envision is a website built to organize the metadata and make it searchable with a critical creative element for interactive exploration. While the former invites literary researchers of animals in speculative fiction, the latter engages quotes, sounds, and images of dogs to blur relations with actual companion species.

SF-canids investigates the connection between people and canids through patterns extracted from a recent canon of speculative fiction that features dogs/wolves/hybrids. Grounded in animal and cultural studies, this project will act as an explorative digital companion to my dissertation project, which examines the human-dog subjects through SF narratives over the last century to ask whether this textual canon of human-animal relation developed, challenged, matched, or aligned with material technological capabilities and ecological situations of the time.

A digital approach supports this work because I can use it to visualize tabular data of hundreds of instances of dogs featured in SF short stories, novels, and novellas. Moreover, I could not publish a monograph with the interactive element I am imagining without the digital platform. Digital methods are necessary to generate visual outputs from the metadata I’ve collected so far. My data model focuses on three categorizations: Canid Relation to Story (antagonist, narrator, supporting character, protagonist), Canid Type (telepathic, bioengineered, non-altered, altered by alien technology, cyborg), and Canid Origin (other world, Earth domestic, Earth stray, Earth hybrid). My thinking on this data model is evolving, but I believe these three categories will make rendered data highlight trends of how SF canids are featured from 1945 to present.