Posts in category: Research

I was invited by the new journal Cultural Analytics to respond to an essay by Sarah Allison, “Other People’s Data: Humanities Edition.” Sarah’s essay makes an important argument for what she calls “data recycling,” and she touches on my collaboration with Ted Underwood on the way. My comment expands on the conditions for effective data reuse. I will be happy if the conversation does not get bogged down in the technicalities of “reproducibility,” and we instead insist on asking how we carry on cumulative research programs. My short essay is open access: From Reproducible to Productive.

Two years ago, I designed and taught a graduate seminar on approaches to Literary Data. I was invited to contribute an essay on the course to Debates in the Digital Humanities. The essay was some time in the writing, and it will be some time longer in the publishing: the next DDH volume is now due to appear at the start of 2018. But by kind permission of the editors, I am able to share a preprint of my essay: Teaching Quantitative Methods: What Makes It Hard (in Literary Studies). If you quote it, please cite its forthcoming publication.

The essay explains the rationale of the course, which combined a practicum in computing with literary data using the R language with theories of literary data from structuralism to the present. My own evaluation of the course is quite mixed, and I offer my materials and my experience not as a model but as evidence for an argument about the conditions of possibility for a successful quantitative methods pedagogy in literary studies. Pedagogy, in this case, also raises serious questions for research; and I also hint at what I take to be the conditions for fruitful quantitative methodology tout court.

I couldn’t have wished for better students—that condition of possibility is indeed already realized. The major lessons I draw are (this is from the essay):

1. Cultivating technical facility with computer tools—including programming languages—should receive less attention than methodologies for analyzing quantitative or aggregative evidence. Despite the widespread DH interest in the former, it has little scholarly use without the latter.

2. Studying method requires pedagogically suitable material for study, but good teaching datasets do not exist. It will require communal effort to create them on the basis of existing research.

3. Following the “theory” model, DH has typically been inserted into curricula as a single-semester course. Yet as a training in method, the analysis of aggregate data will undoubtedly require more time, and a different rationale, than that offered by what Gerald Graff calls “the field-coverage principle” in the curriculum.

Some more remarks on the essay and the course follow after the jump.

Every year, I teach Early Twentieth-Century Fiction. In the first lecture, I tell my students that the baseline fact about fiction in this period is expansion: more books, more readers, more writers. It is this expansion which makes possible the diversification and hierarchization that characterize the literary field in the twentieth century. And every year, I want to illustrate these claims quantitatively. It seems straightforward enough: surely, somewhere in my small pile of book-history books, there would be a table of figures of fiction production over time that will let me substantiate this straightforward point. But the best I have managed so far has been disappointingly vague and broad-brush, cobbled together from a table here and an offhand summary there in work by book historians.

For my research on popular fiction genres, I have been working through Publishers’ Weekly in the decades on either side of 1900. It has the additional convenience of being digitally available, since scans of the yearly volumes are in HathiTrust (and, mirabile dictu, actually organized under a single catalogue entry). PW is one of the sources for the figures I have seen, since it kept a running bibliography of new books, and every January printed an annual summary of the past year’s production. Since I was reading those annual summaries anyway, I decided to transcribe PW’s tallies of yearly fiction production. Perhaps it would be possible to automate the transcription, but trying to get, say, Tabula going here was more work than just writing down the numbers in a CSV file myself.

It occurred to me that this transcription might be useful to others, and that it wouldn’t hurt to make it possible to build on it. So I have put it on github. I didn’t have the time to transcribe the full tables, so there’s work to be done to get PW’s other categories transcribed. And other fundamental time series for the literary field would be equally useful: statistics from other countries, of course (I am also going through the Publishers’ Circular myself); but also anything about readership or the book market.

Last year I participated in a symposium at the University of Utrecht on The Ethics of Autonomy. Many of the contributions to that symposium now appear in revised form in a special issue of the Journal of Dutch Literature, edited by the symposium organizers, Frans Ruiter and Wilbert Smulders. I contributed a response to the whole, Autonomy Proliferates. The issue is in English, but all the titles have Dutch versions as well, and I particularly appreciate the rather more poetic-sounding version of mine, “Autonomie bloeit.”

Most of the essays discuss the work of the Dutch novelist W.F. Hermans, a writer for whom literary autonomy was, as Ruiter and Smulders argue in their own contribution, a central concern. But the journal issue is really very wide-ranging, both in terms of approaches and in terms of the subject matter which the pretext of autonomy makes possible. A number of essays take up the cultural theories of Pierre Bourdieu: Ruiter and Smulders draw close parallels between Bourdieu and Hermans; Thomas Vaessens makes a provocative argument against accepting what he calls Bourdieu’s “faith in autonomy”; Laurens Ham complicates Bourdieu’s framework in his study of the continuing struggles over autonomy in contemporary Dutch literature from Multatuli to the present; and as for me, well—no surprises about my theoretical touchstones, if you know me for the fanboy I am.

That’s not to say that the contributors are all in lockstep. In addition to the controversy between Ruiter and Smulders and Vaessens about autonomy and responsibility, strikingly different views of autonomy emerge in the other essays, by Derek Attridge, Aukje van Rooden, Marc de Kesel, and Arnold Heumakers.

Hermans was a new writer for me and a great pleasure to explore, even if only in translation. His output is mostly unavailable in English; Ina Rilke has translated two of his novels, The Darkroom of Damocles and Beyond Sleep. I glance at the latter in my contribution to the special issue. The JDL special issue also includes English translations of two short pieces of Hermans’s writing: a biting manifesto, “Unsympathetic Fictional Characters” (trans. I. Rilke), and an enigmatic early story, “An Emancipation” (trans. M. Hutchison).

[Edited 12/27/15: Ham’s essay, “The Specialism of Unspecificity,” is not only about contemporary writing—nor, of course, is Bourdieu his only theoretical interlocutor, any more than he is for any of the other scholars here.]

Over the winter break came the terribly sad news of the sudden death of Daniel Albright. His own web site has a notice and a brief biography of this remarkable scholar and teacher; the Harvard Crimson also published an obituary. (If I find other notices and memorials I’ll edit this post.) I’m thinking of him and of all the people close to him.

He was my teacher for one semester in my last year as an undergraduate, when I took his seminar on Beckett and Auden (“Early Postmodernism”). I’m sorry to say I didn’t keep in touch after I graduated, but in thinking about Daniel Albright these last few weeks I’ve realized he made a big mark on me, which I wanted to briefly trace here by way of tribute.

My essay on the sociology of G. V. Desani, “Hatterr Abroad: G. V. Desani on the Scene of World Literature,” is now out in Contemporary Literature (downloadable via JSTOR). I take the reception of Desani’s novel All About H. Hatterr as a demonstration of the divergences among readers in the system of “world literature,” a system structured by inequalities of symbolic power. The novel itself makes a theme of this disempowerment at the hands of cultural mediators—but Desani’s satire did not forestall readers in India, Britain, and the United States from appropriating his novel for their own purposes as a cornerstone of a properly “desi” Indian novel canon, a freakish feat of style, or an exemplar of global or international modernism. My account thus emphasizes a sociological interpretation of reception and mediation over the meanings one might discover through a “reading” of Hatterr.

I draw a cautionary lesson for modernist studies from my study of Desani’s reception: Desani, linked from the first with international high modernism, is always also read as inferior and belated by comparison to the axial figures of the Anglo-modernist canon to whom he is insistently compared. My prognosis for the field’s attempts to “expand” modernism is quite pessimistic; individual good intentions stand little chance in the face of the complicity, so clearly traced by Desani’s reception history, among the Eliot-Joyce canon, the uneven geographic distribution of symbolic power, and the reading protocols dictated by modernist aesthetics.

In true Hatterr-ly fashion, my material on Desani and his work insistently spilled over the bounds of the essay and its argument. The nice thing about a blog is that there’s somewhere to spill. So a couple of extra fragments.

For the past year I have been working with the journal Signs on their fortieth anniversary project. Signs@40: Feminist Scholarship through Four Decades is now live. It features an interactive visualization of a topic model of the journal’s archive that I created in collaboration with Andy Mazzaschi, Susana Galán, Laura Lovin, and Lindsey Whitmore. The model is accompanied by commentary—both our own guide to exploration and commentaries by Signs editors and contributors past and future. The Signs group also created a series of thematic tables of contents for the journal and adapted a co-citation network visualization originally developed by Jonathan Goodwin. The whole provides many pathways for exploring the work of this central institution of feminist scholarship.

We will shortly make the source code available on github, where I’ll also add a few more technical notes on our modeling process and our visualization design. Here are some early thoughts about the site itself, now that it is at last whole and public: