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 corpus?), how I modified them (did I eliminate stop words? what is a stop word? did I rectify OCR errors? what is OCR?), which machine learning method I used (logistic regression or naïve Bayes? what's the difference?), what coding package I used (scikit-learn?), how I evaluated the results (with a p-value? an F-score? does it matter?).

What I foreground depends on how I imagine my audience. Who, tacitly or not, do I include — and who do I exclude? For many of my peers outside of cultural analytics, the field too often slips into technical language, alienating them. For practitioners, the use of technical language allows us to engage with statisticians and data scientists, but risks, as Tess notes in her review of Andrew Piper's Enumerations, leveraging the mathematical sublime toward unearned authority. If I want to speak to an audience who I can presume knows and cares about stop words and OCR and logistic regression, I will send my work to Cultural Analytics. If I'd rather privilege the stakes for literary studies, I'll send it to American Literary History.

Katherine Bode argues that discussing process matters for more than demarcating one's audience: it bears argumentative weight, without which the practitioner is, at best, engaging in mystification and, at worst — if the practitioner has not taken process adequately into consideration — making claims without any basis at all. Laura recognizes Bode's devotion to process as an invitation to book historians and big tent digital humanists into cultural analytics. Laura also illuminates the gendered dimensions in Bode's care work of data curation and how her focus on process belongs to her modest style, a rejection of Moretti's masculinist messianism.

Laura notes that Bode's modesty is refreshing even as it "risks underselling the significance of the project."1 I agree on both counts. We would do well, in cultural analytics, to practice the modesty on display in A World of Fiction. The challenge is to find a balance without obscuring the stakes. The more I read the more I came to feel that Bode's privileging of process and modesty led her to downplay fascinating discoveries and to bracket political implications that she leaves beyond her purview.

2: Politics

Bode reveals that much of what we thought we knew about early Australian literature was wrong. It was wrong because scholars — and here Bode is in tune with Piper — were generalizing on the basis of badly skewed samples. Against previous understandings, it turns out that early Australian fiction was dominated, in terms of output, not by book publishers but by newspapers, and not by metropolitan newspapers but by those in the provinces. Laura describes well Bode's heroic efforts, in concert with Trove, to curate this newspaper fiction and make it publicly available. Bode tells for the first time how this substantial body of work found print through a network of transnational literary agents and their syndicates — "most fiction reprinting in provincial newspapers involved an extensive, active, and hitherto essentially unrecognized array of syndication agencies operating within and beyond the colonies" — hinting at an expanded early history of literary agency in the US that is of great interest for ongoing work I'm doing on publishing conglomerates and that Laura is doing on twenty-first-century literary agents and their networks, and that we're both doing amid growing scholarly interest in contemporary American publishing.2

Did Australia develop a distinct literary tradition in the nineteenth century? This is a key question for the study of any national literature and Bode shows that scholars in her field have got it wrong. For one, they have not achieved consensus. Some argue that Australian literature remained merely derivative of British literature; others argue that Australian writers developed a unique tradition of writing about the bush. Bode persuasively argues for the latter.

But scholars have mischaracterized the bush tradition in one fundamental way. Summarizing the conventional account, she writes,

beginning in the nineteenth century, fiction replicated the legal lie of terra nullius by not depicting Australia's original inhabitants. The repression required of such concealment is understood to give Australian literature a peculiarly Gothic character, wherein the "haunted" or "occulted bush" is "full of unseen 'presences,'" and the successful occupation of the land is "replaced by preoccupation, by a bothersome sense of something that is already there"3

The premise of this theory (which, as an Americanist, I read as fascinatingly parallel to Toni Morrison's argument for a repressed Africanist presence that haunts American literature) is, Bode discovers, wrong. Early Australian writers did not repress Aborigines, on the contrary, "the most surprising aspect of these stories is their consistent and prominent portrayal of Aboriginal characters, and the complexity of those representations."4

This discovery leads Bode to indict extant scholarship for obscuring reality through ideologically-motivated arguments. Literary critics, she writes, not early Australian writers excluded Aborigines from literary history. And literary critics, she writes, make this error because of an attachment to an "identity politics" in which "oppression and emancipation are equated with nonrepresentation and representation, respectively."5 Attempting to be progressive and liberatory, literary critics have, ironically, erased the Aboriginal presence in Australian literature.

This is the most striking moment where Bode's privileging of process does her a disservice. She could not arrive at this bombshell without her extensive and rigorous data curation and her careful use of topic modeling, but her commitment to explaining that work makes it too easy to miss what the work amounts to, the intervention it allows.

Further, she stops at her indictment when there is so much more I want to know. If fiction didn't serve the state by reinforcing the lie that the land was empty and thus free to settle without guilt, then what was fiction's relationship to the state? How did the ambivalent portrayal of the Aboriginal populations participate (or not) in colonization? And what, in the first place, is at stake in Bode's pursuit of a national literature? Given the large role that ideological commitments, on the part of writers and critics, have played in the history of national literatures, what are her own? She too often makes it seem as if her stakes are about an isolated truth claim, a correction of the record. The change in tone is part of why her indictment of extant scholarship as corrupted by ideology is thrilling. But she leaves these political stakes, and how they dovetail with postcolonial theory, largely in abeyance.

Bode has written a book that intervenes in digital humanities. As Laura observes, she writes with that audience in mind. And that is all to the good, a sign of the field's new maturity. But I wish she shifted the balance enough to be clearer about her interventions in Australian literary history, national literatures, and postcolonial theory. For those of us writing in her wake, it is a reminder that gauging one's audience is one of the biggest challenges introduced by doing cultural analytics.

3: Generosity

I have focused on what Bode did not write to suggest how generative her book is. Her provocations, as Laura notes, are a model of generous scholarship. A World of Fiction, the book and its scholarly edition of the literary system of early Australian newspaper fiction, should serve as the foundation for countless research projects. I finished the book not with the sense that she'd said the final word on the subject, but the opposite, that we know so little about literary history and that, thanks to her work, we'll soon know much more.

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Dan Sinykin is a postdoctoral fellow in digital humanities at the University of Notre Dame. Beginning in fall 2019, he will be an assistant professor of English at Emory University. He is the editor of Contemporaries.

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