Contemporaries Essays

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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:…

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…

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…

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…