My article with Ted Underwood on the long-term history of literary studies is now available in a preprint form (pdf). This essay will appear in NLH, but the publisher has kindly given permission for us to make a submitted manuscript available now. Please keep your eyes open for the final published version. It’s been a long (though enjoyable) journey from our initial exploratory blog post in late 2012 to this essay.
The article’s primary evidence is a topic model of seven scholarly journals in literary studies that span the last century and a bit more. In order to make this form of evidence more accessible, I designed a website that allows you to explore the model. Ted and I spent a long time exploring the many, many different ways you can slice and dice topic models before arriving at the claims we make in the essay. To get a sense of how we might have gotten there, spend some time surfing the model, seeing both its power to reveal and its inevitable froth of randomness and approximation. And, hopefully, you’ll discover patterns of your own.
What I’m most proud of in our essay is our effort to show why our approach responds to central questions in literary history and literary theory. We are interested in topic modeling in itself, but I see our essay as aiming primarily at two things. We try to revise literary scholarship’s conception of its own history. And we argue that quantitative methodologies in literary history, far from dispensing with interpretation, attempt to scale up the interpretation of cultural texts while keeping the major problems of interpretation in view. This scaling-up tends to bring humanistic scholarship into closer proximity to the challenges and methodologies of the social sciences.
I’m planning to expand on that last claim in my talk at DH 2014…. Ted’s and my joint formulations are in the essay. Read it, and browse the website.
After the jump, the rest of this post is all geeking out about programming and workflows.