Markdown for slides is a great idea. Don’t painfully lay out each slide, click by click: just write down an outline and let a program generate the slides for you. The almighty Pandoc does this very well. You write plain text, and a single pandoc command produces slides in one of a number of nice HTML formats (like reveal.js or slidy), ready to be uploaded, or in PDF.

I switched over to this way of doing things last year. It was a relief to stop fighting with Keynote,¹ which is nice as presentation programs go but still exhausting: it constantly makes wrong guesses about formatting; putting text where you want is a struggle, and inevitably imprecise. And, worst of all, adding notes for myself to slides is pretty hopeless. I always ended up having to create two parallel versions of each class: the slides, and my own notes. That involved a lot of redundant work. By contrast, once I started writing my slides and notes together, I got my materials for class together quite a bit faster. Whether the temptation to further procrastination/tinkering was really healthy is a separate issue.

Anyway, markdown for slides with pandoc is pretty simple and easy-to-use, but because I wanted some features that the HTML formats do not easily support, I was tempted into going with pandoc’s capacity to generate LaTeX slides using the beamer package. Getting what I want out of that setup is what makes easy slides difficult. (If you want easy slides made easy, consider Ben Schmidt’s suggestions.) Here’s what I do these days. All the bits and pieces for doing this can be found in my repository of TeX stuff on github, in the lecture-slides directory. [Edit, May 18, 2016: I now use a slightly tidier set-up, available in a new repository.] For a sample of the kind of results I get, see the slides from my Early Twentieth-Century Fiction course this semester, for example a lecture on Djuna Barnes.

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.

Signs@40: 1975–2014

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.

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.

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.

Friday: “Teaching Modernist Genres” Roundtable

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).

Saturday: “A Wrinkle in Time: Modernism Then and Again”

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

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:

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

I’m giving a talk at the Literary and Cultural Studies Colloquium at Carnegie Mellon this Thursday, October 2:

Is it our job to be the best readers?

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.

I’ve updated the Teaching page with descriptions for my Spring 2015 courses. I’m always glad to hear from interested students at my Rutgers e-mail.

In the undergraduate program, I’m teaching Principles of Literary Study: Prose, one of the English major requirements. There’s nothing quite like having the chance to be the pied piper introduce the great intellectual pleasures of my subject. (This was formerly “Principles of Literary Study: Fiction,” and I really teach the course as a principled introduction to fictional narrative. A course goal: students will be able to explain the distinction between prose, fiction, and arrative.) This syllabus is forthcoming.

My graduate course is new, and very experimental: Literary Data: Some Approaches. It’s about quantification and data in literary studies, an issue current discussed in and around “DH” but really part of the long dance of literary studies with the other human sciences. We’re going to learn enough programming (in R) to start in on analyzing data. I hold no particular brief for “coding” or “making,” but I think this is the best route into the quantitative at the moment, as well as an important way to concretize the theoretical and methodological debate about literary data.

The website for Ted Underwood’s and my Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies has just been updated. Though this doesn’t add much in the way of new functionality (just a slightly modified bibliography display), every single chronological datum on the site has been changed to correct an error. Importantly, this means:

1. Every time-series chart is slightly different (more explanation below).
2. These charts now match the visualizations in our preprint article, which were not subject to this error.
3. Article bibliographic information more closely matches JSTOR’s.

In not entirely unrelated news, I learned more about date encoding in Javascript and d3.js. After the jump, an explanation of the bug.

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.