I have pushed up a new version of dfr-browser, the d3-based topic-model browser I put together while working on topic-modeling journals from JSTOR. This version has more visualization options and a somewhat richer interface, thanks to bootstrap CSS.

Though I do hope others may be able to adapt the code to share and explore their own topic models, the main use of this project is to help me, and I hope others in the humanities/social sciences who are interested in this technique, to develop a stronger sense of what a topic model is and how it slices and dices a corpus of documents. For a fuller discussion of what dfr-browser does, see the new project page hosted on the handy-dandy Github Pages. Also part of the presentation is a demo of the tool, showing a (ragged though not totally uninteresting) 64-topic model of PMLA articles since 1889.

d3 is kind of addictively fun, and goes very well with the game of writing Javascript as “Lisp in C’s clothing” (as Douglas Crockford says). I wouldn’t have done this at all, but for the pleasure I had working through Crockford’s Javascript: The Good Parts and Scott Murray’s introduction to d3, Interactive Data Visualization for the Web.

It’s a busy digital month here.

Omeka Workshop at Rutgers

The second workshop in the Rutgers DH workshop series, on Omeka, will take place on October 24. It will be led by a member of the Omeka dev team, Sheila Brennan.

Conference: Remediating the Avant-Gardes, 10/25–26

This conference at Princeton, convened by the Blue Mountain Project, is focused on the central topic of magazines and digital archives. I am the discussant on a panel on Saturday morning with some very interesting papers, “Navigating Avant-Garde Collections, Systems and Networks” (9:30-11:30 a.m., McCormick 101):

I spent last Friday and Saturday at an excellent workshop on Indian Literature as Comparative Literature, organized by Preetha Mani of the AMESALL department at Rutgers. The workshop focused on the relations among the regional languages and literatures of South Asia and the question of their joint participation in “modern” or “modernist” Indian literature. I had the pleasure of being the discussant for a panel with Snehal Shingavi, Kumkum Sangari, and Francesca Orsini. For me, someone with interest in but very limited knowledge of South Asian literatures, and no modern S. Asian languages (except…English), the talks and discussion provided all kinds of leads into scholarship and primary sources from South Asia I want to know more about—and, equally, a wealth of stimulating comparative and theoretical ideas.¹

I’m participating as a panel discussant in a workshop at Rutgers tomorrow and Saturday, organized in the AMESALL Department: Indian Literature as Comparative Literature.

There’s a really exciting schedule of talks tomorrow, Friday, September 27:

1. Rethinking Comparativism (10 a.m.). Kumkum Sangari (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Francesca Orsini (School of Oriental and African Studies), Shehal Shingavi (University of Texas-Austin), and Andrew Goldstone, discussant (Rutgers Unviversity).

2. Novel Experimentations (1:30 p.m.). Satya Mohanty (Cornell University), Vasudha Dalmia (Yale University), Krupa Shandilya (Amherst College), and Mukti Lakhi Mangharam, discussant (Rutgers University).

3. The Local and the Global (4 p.m.). Preetha Mani (Rutgers University), Anjali Nerlekar (Rutgers University), Kannan Muthukrishnan (French Institute of Pondicherry), and Pritipuspa Mishra, discussant (Princeton University)

All events in the Pane Room, Alexander Library.

Saturday has a roundtable at 10:30 a.m., with Francesca Orsini and Janet Walker.

Myles na Gopaleen has your memex right here:

Similarly with our non-brow who wants his friends to infer from a glancing around his house that he is a high-brow. He buys an enormous book on the Russian ballet, written possibly in the language of that distant but beautiful land. Our problem is to alter the book in a reasonably short time so that anybody looking at it will conclude that its owner has practically lived, supped and slept with it for many months. You can, if you like, talk about designing a machine driven by a small but efficient petrol motor that would ‘read’ any book in five minutes, the equivalent of five years or ten years’ ‘reading’ being obtained by merely turning a knob. This, however, is the cheap soulless approach of the times we live in. No machine can do the same work as the soft human fingers. The trained and experienced book-handler is the only real solution of this contemporary social problem.¹

And you can keep your Google Book scanners and your Index Thomisticuses. This is the originary moment for digital humanities I want.

Fictions of Autonomy is now available digitally via Oxford Scholarship Online. It’s particularly exciting to be the author of a book with a DOI: doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199861125.001.0001. I’m grateful to the anonymous (re)digitizers of the text at Oxford University Press for their work. The digital form is a clean, streamlined set of webpages with my text—not page images. The text is handily searchable (via the whole-database search), and all the citations in the footnotes are also hyperlinked to your local library catalogue. I think the physical codex is still better for serious reading, note-taking, and so on. But I would, wouldn’t I?

And if that title doesn’t grab you, I don’t know what will.

This is a little belated: the new special topic-modeling issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities is out. The guest editors chose Ted Underwood’s and my blog post on modeling PMLA for inclusion: What Can Topic Models of PMLA Teach Us About the History of Literary Scholarship?. It’s great to be part of it. The whole issue is beautifully put together in both its web and PDF forms, and it gives a sense of the excitement of the discussions in computational text analysis for the humanities right now. After the jump, my all-too-brief appreciations, plus a note of speculation about the future of this conversation.

I’m currently in Toronto participating in the American Comparative Literature Association meeting. My seminar, organized by David Alworth, is on “New Sociologies of Literature,” and it’s open to anyone at the conference. I’m presenting tomorrow at 11 a.m.; also on tomorrow’s slate: Laura Heffernan and Rachel Buurma, Kate Eichhorn, and David Alworth. Our location is subject to change, so check with the ACLA organizers, but we’re scheduled to be in Victoria College 215.

My own contribution is titled “Coding: Literary Field Theory, Categories, and Judgments.” I can promise invocations of both Bourdieu and Richard Scarry. More to the point, I can promise that my fellow panelists will be awesome and the discussion is guaranteed to be lively.

This post could also be called: Walter Benjamin in the Age of Me Noodling Around with Small Data.

On Monday I participated in a roundtable discussing Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”/“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Rereading this essay after not having looked at it in five years or so, I was struck by the degree to which Benjamin anticipated (or, better, laid the groundwork for) both the rhetoric and the analytic procedures of contemporary historicist literary criticism and cultural studies: coordinating large social-structural changes with changes in artistic genres and artistic values; attending to popular culture alongside high culture; and, especially, announcing the imperative to “politicize art.” This is not quite as banal as might seem—after all, Benjamin was not an academic, and this famous essay is not a work of literary criticism or of philology. Anyway it made me want to think more about the reception history of this essay.

I had wanted to bring to that roundtable a couple of quick factoids from that reception history using JSTOR’s archive of scholarly journals. I didn’t quite manage the nice handout I envisioned, but as I put together my remarks I gathered a little data, and so this post relates the explorations I made.