Archive for May, 2019

Fuck the Avant-Garde

Rachel Greenwald Smith

Afterword: Cultural Analytics Next

In his introduction to this cluster, Dan wrote that cultural analytics “has arrived at a new dispensation,” catalyzed by the publication of A World of Fiction, Enumerations, and Distant Horizons. This new phase is…

Gauging One’s Audience: a Response to Laura B. McGrath

1: Process Whether to foreground process is a central question for cultural analytics. How much does the reader need to know about the texts in my corpus (what is a…

More Specific, More Complex

Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction 1: Remember when we used to fight about corpora? I read Katherine Bode’s “The Equivalence of Close and Distant Reading; Or, toward a New Object…

Charisma (Embodiment): a Response to Tess McNulty

1: In fall 2018, I made the trek across the Bay to Berkeley, where Andrew Piper was giving a talk drawn from his newly-published Enumerations. He presented results from chapter six,…

Models and Meaning

Andrew Piper, Enumerations: Data and Literary Studies 1: Models Andrew Piper’s Enumerations: Data and Literary Studies, published by the University of Chicago Press last August, begins with a simple, if inflammatory, charge:…

Seeing Double: a Response to Dan Sinykin

Ted Underwood’s Distant Horizons is a book that concerns continuity and courts consensus. That sets the tone just right for this response, as there is much in Dan’s review with which I…

Distant Reading and Literary Knowledge

Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change 1: Conflict Ted Underwood is ambitious. In Distant Horizons, published in February by University of Chicago Press, he reports that recent advances…

Introduction: Cultural Analytics Now

Call it cultural analytics or distant reading or data-rich literary studies. It is that branch of digital humanities that most leans on quantitative methods to understand its objects. For much…

Ironies of Web 2.0

Damon R. Young