Eight years ago, I taught an undergraduate literary theory course with a section on the history and theory of the English curriculum itself. I spent some time looking at the University Archives’ collection of Rutgers course catalogues in order to make a selection for students. One of the pleasurable discoveries was the English listings of Livingston College in its early years (here 1971):
Only in the course of preparing a graduate seminar session on Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters did I learn that Casanova died, far too early, three years ago at the age of 59. No one would have appreciated better than Casanova the significance of delayed uptake. But, all ironies about myself aside, I was quite moved by the memorial notices by Gisèle Sapiro for the Institute of World Literature and by Joseph Jurt for Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Here’s a brief belated tribute of my own.
About a decade ago—painful words to type—I started working on an empirical study of the bibliography of scholarship on modernism. I intended it to be a quick side-project, maybe a piece of an essay or a book introduction, that would bolster my theoretical argument for alternatives to “modernism” as a period concept for studies of the twentieth century. It was also my first foray into quantitative work, which possibly explains why it has seemed to need so many further iterations since then. In any case, I now have an essay version, which I call “Modernist Studies without Modernism,” which I am ready to make public. I have posted it to an Open Science Framework repository which also points to a reproducibility archive with R markdown source code for the essay and (processed and cleaned) data.
This post is a discussion and partial replication of Ted Underwood and Jordan Sellers’s fascinating essay “How Quickly Do Literary Standards Change?” (available in preprint and discussed on Ted’s blog). Hats off to Ted and Jordan, who have contributed something really remarkable here, not just in their provocative arguments but in the data they have made usable by others. It’s one thing to circulate data and code so that someone can in principle re-run your scripts—though that is already a lot—and quite another to make the data accessible enough for fresh analyses. The latter is a very demanding standard, too demanding for everyone to meet, I think. But it is what is required to let others build directly on your results. Even more importantly, it’s what’s needed to make research results pedagogically available. As I argue in an essay I’m working on now, any quantitative methods pedagogy should—must—lean heavily on the results of research. In the immortal words of Miriam Posner, “It’s just awful trying to find a humanities dataset”: one of the best ways to address this challenge would be to make good research data available in recirculable, easily accessible form.
So consider this post partly pedagogical in intent: I want to show that Ted and Jordan’s replication repository is already an excellent dataset and could be the basis for a lesson in automatic classification. What I want to emphasize here is that their work allows us to breeze right past the data-wrangling and straight into the analytical substance. This may not be entirely obvious from their python code, so I’m going to try to make it clearer by doing the whole thing in R instead.
Rather than give all the technical detail, I’ll only show the R code where it makes a point about the analysis. The full R markdown source for this post is in this repository. Feel free to skim right past the R listings anyway. This is a literary theory and data analysis post that happens to have some software details in it, not a programming post. Here we go…
I’m speaking at NYU this Thursday afternoon, at the invitation of the NYU Digital Experiments group:
One of the most promising prospects for quantitative methods in literary studies is that of rigorous and empirically wide-ranging accounts of the relations between literature and society. Yet the boundary between textual interpretation and a sociological analysis of literature has proven surprisingly hard to cross. In this talk, I retrace some sociological traditions of quantitative textual study, from postwar content analyses of political opinion to contemporary field theory, and I argue that they offer literary scholars alternatives to the doxa of “reading” that dominates and limits methodological discussion in our discipline. The sociological traditions turn us from corpus to field, from text collections to social spaces of symbolic competition and collaboration. I will discuss (and exemplify) the many challenges and pitfalls of this shift, technical and conceptual, in my own attempts to quantify the changing status of “reading” in the history of literary scholarship.
If you’re around, the talk is in Bobst Library (2nd fl., Avery Fisher Center, East Room) at 4:30. Come accuse me of naïve positivism, I dare you.
Here are some tentative notes on methodological problems in quantitative approaches to literary history that I’ve been worrying over. I’m moved to post these because of two great discussions of quantitative literary studies by sociologists, a review by Ben Merriman of recent work by Franco Moretti and Matt Jockers, and a blog post by Tressie McMillan Cottom on quantitative text analysis across the disciplines. Monomaniacal proselytizer for closer relations between sociology and literary study that I am, first I say: go read those! They’re really great! Also, I’m leaping onto this bandwagon. Mostly I want to indicate how this very useful pressure from sociologists might help literary scholarship to refine its methods and clarify its research program. I’m afraid this is all very drafty, in the form of broad assertions with basically no citations. Blogging!
I’ll be in Cambridge (in the Dave Barry sense of the word) on Wednesday, March 4, to give a talk to the British Studies Colloquium of the Harvard English department. Here’s my abstract:
The early twentieth century is the modernist period. Or so we say. Does this idea, codified in the institutions of modernist studies, limit our understanding of literary history? In this talk, I use a study of thousands of MLA Bibliography entries to argue that the modernist period concept is regulated, in practice, by an all-too-familiar canon of authors (Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Pound), in spite of efforts to expand modernism culturally, geographically, and historically. These names stand for the equation of formal-aesthetic innovation, as it was practiced in Euro-American avant-garde scenes, with the literary culture of modernity. The menace of the modernist period concept is that this equation is tenacious but wrong. It conflates the whole of the literary field with its most consecrated part, precluding the study of the structural transformation of literary production and reception in the first half of the century. That transformation gives rise, not to a legible Zeitgeist, but to a system of hierarchically organized genres with non-synchronous histories. By way of speculative conclusion, I briefly compare histories of several popular fiction genres and suggest that the study of literary classification systems is a necessary complement to the study of that single high-literary genre we call “modernism.”
The talk is at 5:15 p.m. in Barker 114.
It has come to my attention that while I am quantifying literary studies in Boston, Franco Moretti will be giving the Goldstone lecture at NYU. If you are racing to my talk and tell your phone, “Take me to the Goldstone lecture, double-quick!” check that you are not being directed to New York City.
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.