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Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

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,…

Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

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:…

Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

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…

Issue 2: How To Be Now, Peer Reviewed Articles

Ironies of Web 2.0

Damon R. Young

Issue 2: How To Be Now, Peer Reviewed Articles

Issue 2: How To Be Now, Peer Reviewed Articles

😂; or, The Word of the Year

C. Namwali Serpell

Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

The Social Forms of Speculative Poetics

From popular dystopian narratives to steampunk, zombie and horror tales to Afrosurrealist texts and alternate histories, speculative modes proliferate across our contemporary cultural landscape. Speculative aesthetics play on the tense,…