This week I’m participating in an event at Rutgers celebrating the launch of Signs@40: Feminist Scholarship through Four Decades, which I co-edited. We’ll hear from past, current, and future editors of Signs, the team that created the retrospective, and members of the Signs editorial board.
Thursday, November 20, 3:00–5:00 p.m.
Mabel Smith Douglass Room, Douglass Library
Rutgers University
8 Chapel Dr.
New Brunswick, NJ 08901 (Google Maps)
Reception to follow.
I’m currently in Pittsburgh for MSA 16. I’m participating in two events: I’m on a pedagogy roundtable today, and chairing a panel tomorrow.
3:30 p.m., Allegheny
Moderator: Emily Kopley (McGill University)
Jacquelyn Ardam (University of California, Los Angeles)
Erin Penner (Asbury University)
Andrew Goldstone (Rutgers University)
Lise Jaillant (Newcastle University)
Kathryn Holland (Grant MacEwan University)
I’ll be talking about my attempts to teach the “low to middling genres” of the twentieth century, especially my two iterations of a seminar on the subject (Stanford, 2010 and Rutgers, 2012).
3:30 p.m., Riverboat
Chair: Andrew Goldstone (Rutgers University)
Historicizing Experimentalism
Natalia Cecire
University of Sussex
Modernist Aesthetics and the Reception of Theological Novels
Anne DeWitt
New York University
Fragmented Ancestors
Leif Sorensen
Colorado State University
This Thursday, I’ll be visiting Penn’s Digital Humanities Forum to discuss topic modeling and the sociology of literature. It’s a “Tools and Techniques” session, which means an informal discussion focused on method. I wonder if I will get in trouble for carrying my personal MALLET on Amtrak. Description:
This workshop introduces probabilistic topic modeling for humanists, focusing on applications in literary studies. Using my own work on the history of literary study as an example, I’ll give an informal introduction to the algorithm, survey the nuts-and-bolts technical choices involved in modeling, and discuss the challenges of interpreting the algorithm’s output. Strange and novel as this technique may seem, I’ll argue that it may be surprisingly well-suited to investigating some of literary studies’ central questions about the relation between literary history and social phenomena—and to rediscovering the methodological concerns the humanities share with the social sciences.
If you’re in Philly, it’s at noon in Penn Library, Seminar 627. Register by e-mailing saravarney@sas.upenn.edu.
Update, 10/16/14: slides
Event poster created by Christopher Wike
I’m giving a talk at the Literary and Cultural Studies Colloquium at Carnegie Mellon this Thursday, October 2:
The emergence of quantitative methods for literary study allows us reassess the relationship between literary scholarship and the practice of expert critical reading. Though reading has the status of doxa in literary studies, it may obscure more than it clarifies about the problems posed by quantification. I exemplify the challenges in a quantitative analysis of scholarship itself, using a probabilistic topic model to explore discursive patterns in twenty-one thousand journal articles from the 1880s to the present. The model reveals, among other things, the surprisingly recent emergence of the theme of reading and the scope of literary studies’ turn toward the terrain of the social sciences since the 1970s. It is, in fact, the social sciences that might help us toward methodological alternatives to “reading” that allow us to make sense of the aggregate patterns in literary practice revealed by techniques like topic modeling.
If you’re in Pittsburgh: it’s at 4:30 p.m. in 255B Baker Hall.
Noli me Tangere. Hans Holbein the Younger, 1524. Wikimedia Commons.
I recently returned from the DH 2014 conference in Lausanne. I went to give my brief (my brief brief) for getting serious about social science methods in digital humanities under the title “Let DH Be Sociological!” The conference offered plenty to think about on this theme. Also I got accused of wanting to “dumb down” an entire field of study…so that’s got me thinking too.
Update, July 11, 2014: my slides are here: slides.pdf. The R code used to generate material in the slides is available in a gist.
Update, July 2026: the online archive of abstracts from the conference has been ruined, so I removed links my and others’ abstracts. They can be found, however, in the PDF of the proceedings.
I’m attending the Digital Humanities 2014 conference in Lausanne next week. If you’re around Lausanne next Friday, my talk, titled “Let DH Be Sociological!,” is part of a panel at 11 a.m. in 415 Amphimax. This paper builds on my work using topic models to analyze the history of literary scholarship, but takes a more polemical tack. I’ll use my ten minutes to argue that the moment of “DH” represents a critical opportunity for bringing literary studies (and perhaps other humanities) closer to the social sciences.
This Thursday and Friday, I’m participating in a symposium on The Ethics of Literary Autonomy organized by Wilbert Smulders and Frans Ruiter at the University of Utrecht. The description of the event is here in Dutch; the full program is in English (pdf). I’m giving a lecture on Friday morning which I’m calling “Autonomy without Ethics: Strangers in the Literary Metropolis.” It’s based on my work in Fictions of Autonomy with some bonus material on G. V. Desani, because Desani.
Given that my principal theoretical claim is that artistic autonomy is always defined in relation to particular social and historical contexts, I’m particularly pleased to be discussing autonomy in contexts that will be quite new to me. I’ll try to post some notes on the symposium here after I return next week.
And if you’re in Utrecht, stop by…
Tomorrow (Wednesday, January 29) is the Rutgers Digital Humanities Showcase. It’s a packed schedule of presentations demonstrating digital humanities work from all around the university. If you’re in the area, stop by Alexander Library’s Teleconference Lecture Hall. We’ll run from 2 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Full schedule at dh.rutgers.edu/showcase. Free food at the end!
I’ll be giving a highly compressed demo of some of my work on topic-modeling and the history of literary studies. But the main reason to come is the revelation of the broad range of exciting digital and humanistic work that is in full swing at Rutgers.
Tomorrow at MLA, I’m participating in a panel on quantitative literary history and the sociology of literature. You can call it digital humanities if you want! You can call it modernist studies if you want! Personally, I call it…
Friday, January 10, 2014
10:15–11:30 a.m., Chicago F, Chicago Marriott
Presiding: Richard Jean So, University of Chicago
Modernism’s Limits: Patterns of Exclusion in Scholarly Reading
Andrew Goldstone
Finding Thomas Curtis Clark: Topic Modeling the Rules of Exclusion in American Modernist Poetry
Richard Jean So and Hoyt Long
Response
Matthew Jockers
Response
Amy Hungerford
I will post my slides on this site before (shortly before) the talk at andrewgoldstone.com/mla2014.
Over on dh.rutgers.edu, I’ve posted extensive notes from last week’s Empowerment Part II workshop on plain text formats like markdown, HTML, and LaTeX. I’ve also made available the set of sample files I used in the workshop, plus a few more. Those might be useful for others who might wish to learn any of those three languages or see what files converted from one to the other look like. I’ve put some time into making the workshop notes into something someone could work through on their own. For more about the files, see the workshop notes. For anyone interested in LaTeX, the template.tex file contained in that set of sample files supplies a starter template for a LaTeX document (it’s derived from the templates in my git repository of tex files). As a bonus I have also made available the markdown source used to generate both that workshop-notes webpage and the slideshow for the in-person version.1
You might reasonably ask: Why spend any time on this? Computer typesetting and the ins and outs of plain-text composition gadgets are very far from the center of the digital humanities. HTML is an important computer language in DH, but LaTeX is no such thing, and markdown is pretty rudimentary-seeming. Some thoughts on this over the fold…