Posts in category: DH

It’s a busy digital month here.

Omeka Workshop at Rutgers

The second workshop in the Rutgers DH workshop series, on Omeka, will take place on October 24. It will be led by a member of the Omeka dev team, Sheila Brennan.

Conference: Remediating the Avant-Gardes, 10/25–26

This conference at Princeton, convened by the Blue Mountain Project, is focused on the central topic of magazines and digital archives. I am the discussant on a panel on Saturday morning with some very interesting papers, “Navigating Avant-Garde Collections, Systems and Networks” (9:30-11:30 a.m., McCormick 101):

Myles na Gopaleen has your memex right here:

Similarly with our non-brow who wants his friends to infer from a glancing around his house that he is a high-brow. He buys an enormous book on the Russian ballet, written possibly in the language of that distant but beautiful land. Our problem is to alter the book in a reasonably short time so that anybody looking at it will conclude that its owner has practically lived, supped and slept with it for many months. You can, if you like, talk about designing a machine driven by a small but efficient petrol motor that would ‘read’ any book in five minutes, the equivalent of five years or ten years’ ‘reading’ being obtained by merely turning a knob. This, however, is the cheap soulless approach of the times we live in. No machine can do the same work as the soft human fingers. The trained and experienced book-handler is the only real solution of this contemporary social problem.¹

And you can keep your Google Book scanners and your Index Thomisticuses. This is the originary moment for digital humanities I want.

This is a little belated: the new special topic-modeling issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities is out. The guest editors chose Ted Underwood’s and my blog post on modeling PMLA for inclusion: What Can Topic Models of PMLA Teach Us About the History of Literary Scholarship?. It’s great to be part of it. The whole issue is beautifully put together in both its web and PDF forms, and it gives a sense of the excitement of the discussions in computational text analysis for the humanities right now. After the jump, my all-too-brief appreciations, plus a note of speculation about the future of this conversation.

This post could also be called: Walter Benjamin in the Age of Me Noodling Around with Small Data.

On Monday I participated in a roundtable discussing Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”/“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Rereading this essay after not having looked at it in five years or so, I was struck by the degree to which Benjamin anticipated (or, better, laid the groundwork for) both the rhetoric and the analytic procedures of contemporary historicist literary criticism and cultural studies: coordinating large social-structural changes with changes in artistic genres and artistic values; attending to popular culture alongside high culture; and, especially, announcing the imperative to “politicize art.” This is not quite as banal as might seem—after all, Benjamin was not an academic, and this famous essay is not a work of literary criticism or of philology. Anyway it made me want to think more about the reception history of this essay.

I had wanted to bring to that roundtable a couple of quick factoids from that reception history using JSTOR’s archive of scholarly journals. I didn’t quite manage the nice handout I envisioned, but as I put together my remarks I gathered a little data, and so this post relates the explorations I made.

Two announcements of events I’m involved in, transpiring in the week after next:

Princeton Digital Humanities Initiative: Roundtable (3/26)

I’ll be joining a group of people at a Princeton Digital Humanities Initiative Graduate Student Outreach. It’s March 26 at 4:30 p.m. in Frist Multipurpose Room C. I’ll talk a bit about the PMLA topic models Ted Underwood and I are working on.

Rutgers: Lecture by Jim English (3/28)

The Rutgers Modernism and Globalization Seminar Series, which I am running this year, is hosting a guest lecture by James F. English of Penn on Thursday, March 28:

Modernism and Globalization Seminar Series

James F. English
John Welsh Centennial Professor of English
University of Pennsylvania

Not Now: Empirical Method and Default Temporality in Contemporary Fiction

Thursday, March 28, 2013, at 4:30 p.m.
Murray Hall, Room 302, 510 George Street
Reception to follow at the Center for Cultural Analysis, 8 Bishop Place
Free and open to the public

Abstract: This paper is mainly concerned with methodological challenges involved in using digital methods and big data in the field of contemporary fiction. It sketches an early-stage “small data” research project and presents some initial empirical (quantitative) results having to do with the temporal settings of Anglophone novels since 1969. These findings then provide an occasion to consider some possible reasons for a shift in the default temporality of the novel, and some possible implications of surface reading with respect to novels that eschew the present in favor of the past, the future, and the temporally queer.

James F. English is the author of The Economy of Prestige (Harvard, 2005) and The Global Future of English Studies (Blackwell, 2012), and Director of the Penn Humanities Forum.

Co-sponsored by the English Department, the Center for Cultural Analysis, and the Rutgers British Studies Center.

[Edit 3/18/13: RBSC link fixed.]

This post is co-written by Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood. It is cross-posted at The Stone and the Shell and Arcade. Update, July 2026: the Arcade version lost links to figures, and JSTOR Data for Analysis is long gone, but the images hosted at Ted's website are still around and linked here, as is, amazingly, the interactive image map linked from the first figure below.

Of all our literary-historical narratives it is the history of criticism itself that seems most wedded to a stodgy history-of-ideas approach—narrating change through a succession of stars or contending schools. While scholars like John Guillory and Gerald Graff have produced subtler models of disciplinary history, we could still do more to complicate the narratives that organize our discipline's understanding of itself.

The archive of scholarship is also, unlike many twentieth-century archives, digitized and available for "distant reading." Much of what we need is available through JSTOR’s Data for Research API. So last summer it occurred to a group of us that topic modeling PMLA might provide a new perspective on the history of literary studies. Although Goldstone and Underwood are writing this post, the impetus for the project also came from Natalia Cecire, Brian Croxall, and Roger Whitson, who may do deeper dives into specific aspects of this archive in the near future.

Theory by the numbers

or, The yack of the hack of the yack

This is a longer version of my proposal for a THATCamp Theory 2012 session.

How we should go about mining the digital archive of the history of scholarship for theoretical resources? Let’s talk about text-mining journals, quantitatively analyzing metadata about scholarship, and living with closed access as theorists. And perhaps we can work on a dataset or two—I’ll bring some example data and laughably primitive visualizations!

Thanks to coverage in the mass media (NY Times) and, more importantly, the scholarly blogosphere (Language Log and again Language Log, Arcade’s own Natalia Cecire, David Crystal…indeed as I am writing this more and more responses are popping up, more than I can read today [later: including right here on Arcade, so go read Paula Moya’s post, too!]), many of you will have already heard about an interesting development coming out of Google Books: an article, to be published in Science, on the Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books by Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden, et al. (Don’t miss the important supplement describing their methods in more detail.) Michel and Lieberman Aiden and their collaborators at Harvard and Google, who have backgrounds not in the humanities but in mathematics, computer science, and biology, have compiled tables of “n-grams,” n=1…5, for a large number of books in Google’s Google Books database. An n-gram is just a sequence of n words. Looking at changes in the frequencies of these n-grams over time, the authors seek to watch cultural change happening—not just qualitatively, but, they claim, quantitatively. Google has also released an interface to the n-gram tables, allowing you to graph the changing frequency of an n-gram of your choice over time.

I have seen the future of the digital humanities—and it is full of hope! It is also full of many happy afternoons spent following hyperlinks into fascinating, and extremely nerdy, cultural niches. Let me explain…

Literary Data graduate course

In Spring 2015 I offered a graduate course, Literary Data: Some Approaches (English 350:509). The course combined a discussion of theories of literary data from the mid-twentieth century to the present with an introduction to literary data analysis in R. The technical material, including slides and problem sets, continues to be available on the course website. I draw some lessons from the course in a Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 essay, “Teaching Quantitative Methods: What Makes It Hard (in Literary Studies)” (preprint).