Although Robert Howard only wrote 17 Conan stories during his short career, writers from the 1950s on have expanded on Conan’s career, situating his adventures across the pre-cataclysmic world of Hyboria. There are roughly 100 Conan tales, written by multiple authors using multiple original sources. This presentation looks at the entire corpus of Conan short stories and novels—what we call the Conanical texts—and uses the data visualization program Tableau to map the wanderings of the notoriously footloose Cimmerian.
More specifically, we mapped several of the qualities that remain consistent throughout all the incarnations of Conan. In addition to the locations of his adventure, we also have mapped what monsters he battled, how many he slew, which sorcerers he ran afoul of, his many loves, and his age during these adventures. It is this last point that should help inform one of the major debates in the larger Conan universe. There are at least five chronologies in circulation—some only following the Howard tales and others including the later revisions and pastiches. Combining chronological clues from close reading and data visualization, we are able to show where Conan was during specific years of his life, allowing us to complicate previous chronologies. Additionally, we will briefly discuss the mechanics of the project, laying out a template for similar investigations into other popular culture figures that span authors and decades.
Not simply for fans of Cimmeria’s favorite raider, this presentation plants one armored foot squarely in the future of data science’s use for popular culture studies and the other, like a Stygian wizard poring over the scrolls of Skelos, in the more-familiar world of textual analysis.
About the presentersJonas Prida
Presently Assistant Provost at Point Park University, where I spend a lot of time thinking about 21st-century learning. I have articles on Weird Tales, Robert Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, George Lippard, Edgar Allen Poe, and Algernon Blackwood. I also was lucky enough to edit Conan Meets the Academy, a multidisciplinary approach to the various incarnations of Conan the Barbarian.
Megan Fahey
Megan Fahey is the Assistant Director of Strategic Programs in the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She has an MFA in Fiction Writing from West Virginia University. Her prior PCA presentations include a data storytelling project about professional wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin and a quantitative analysis of allusions in 90s Nickelodeon cartoons.