- Graduate Center of the City University of New York, English, AlumnusNew York University, English, AlumnusWashington University in St. Louis, English, Alumnusadd
- I am a postdoctoral fellow at PSU's Center for Humanities and Information. A former (though occasionally relapsing) computer programmer, I now study resonances between contemporary technologies and intellectual history, especially in relation to the linguistic and poetic theories of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.edit
Research Interests:
Word-search technologies have played a significant role in literary scholarship for decades, yet they have received little attention from literary theorists. This paper considers how we might more thoughtfully approach the use of search... more
Word-search technologies have played a significant role in literary scholarship for decades, yet they have received little attention from literary theorists. This paper considers how we might more thoughtfully approach the use of search in navigating cultural material from the nineteenth century. Taking the writings of Walt Whitman as both an example and a theoretical foil, I argue that the use of these tools can amplify historical differences in word use that are relatively unimportant to close reading, influencing what sorts of texts we read in ways that are not immediately apparent. I suggest that if we as literary scholars are to use word search in our research, we should approach it from a philological point of view, actively exploring the limits of our knowledge about the linguistic practices of the past and considering the effects of technological mediation on our encounters with historical texts.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
While numerous literary scholars have raised concerns about the capacity of computational methods to reveal unrecognized features of literary form and content, few have explored the approach of interpreting these methods in relation to... more
While numerous literary scholars have raised concerns about the capacity of computational methods to reveal unrecognized features of literary form and content, few have explored the approach of interpreting these methods in relation to historical antecedents (such as the eighteenth-century subject index) that were similarly designed for comprehending and representing large amounts of text in easily intelligible formats. This essay compares methods of mapping the contents of texts from different historical periods by examining Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) from two perspectives: that of its 1784 index and that of a topic model generated from the text. We contend that this sort of comparative interpretation of models demonstrates a new way to consider computational methods not as heralding a break from print genres like the index but, instead, as participating in a longer tradition of practices that have sought to make massive amounts of text accessible for readers, whether they are human or machine.
Research Interests:
This article addresses the ‘meaning problem’ of unsupervised topic modeling algorithms using a tool called the Networked Corpus, which offers a way to visualize topic models alongside the texts themselves. We argue that the relation- ship... more
This article addresses the ‘meaning problem’ of unsupervised topic modeling algorithms using a tool called the Networked Corpus, which offers a way to visualize topic models alongside the texts themselves. We argue that the relation- ship between quantitative methods and qualitative interpretation can be reframed by investigating the long history of machine learning procedures and their his- torical antecedents. The new method of visualization presented by the Networked Corpus enables users to compare the results of topic models with earlier methods of topical representation such as the 18th-century subject index. Although the article provides a brief description of the tool, the primary focus is to describe an argument for this kind of comparative analysis between topic models and older genres that perform similar tasks. Such comparative analysis provides a new method for developing conceptual histories of the categories of meaning on which the topic model and the index depend. These devices are linked by a shared attempt to represent what a text is ‘about’, but the concept of ‘aboutness’ has evolved over time. The Networked Corpus enables researchers to discover congruities and contradictions in how topic models and indexes represent texts in order to examine what kinds of information each historically situated device prioritizes.