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.
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A browsable network based on Underwood’s model of PMLA is available at pmla.site44.com.
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.