For anyone who has ever given a talk using computational methods the response, “But didn’t we already know that?”, looms large in your consciousness. Nothing feels more deflating…and frustrating. I always want to respond, well, we believed we knew it and now we have more […]
We recently put out a paper on how racial bias functions in Hollywood films. This work was based on a few studies that came before it, namely this one, from USC Annenberg. We presented numerical analyses like the number of characters in different racial and […]
As part of my new book, I have made the code and all derived text data freely available online. The underlying text data has been shared as far as copyright restrictions would allow. As I mentioned in my initial post, this entailed a massive amount […]
My new book, Enumerations: Data and Literary Study, is now out with the University of Chicago Press. It’s a long-form exploration of the meaning of quantity in literature, from a study of punctuation in poetry, to plot structure in novels, to the semantics of character […]
Ever since Fotis Jannidis posted a graph on novel classification a few years ago I have been inspired to do something similar in English. What are the ways in which scholars over the past half-century have classified “the novel”? Using a collection of over 60,000 […]
Very pleased that new research on racial bias in Hollywood cinema by lab members Vicky Svaikovsky, Anne Meisner and Eve Kraicer has been featured on the CBC today. A really moving set of interviews with Canadian actors to discuss impressions of the lack of diversity in […]
I am very pleased to announce the launch of a new series of papers that will be coming out of .txtLAB in the months (and hopefully years) to come. We are calling them “collaborations,” and not just because it’s a pun on the word “lab.” […]
Pronouns have become a hot topic of late and I thought it would be interesting to explore their use in the new JSTOR data set that I have been working on that represents 60 years of literary studies articles. Previous work has shown how men […]