In the old days, people used to talk about gaming the system. It meant manipulating the rules to produce a desired outcome. The term was popularized by software engineers in 1975. Today, we hear a lot more about “gamification,” another term popularized by software engineers. […]
Anne Meisner, Victoria Svaikovsky, Will Schumer and Cheng Lin have produced a new lab collaboration that explores the nature of “character universes.” The Marvel character universe is said to mark a major new moment in Hollywood film production and we were interested in better understanding […]
Eve Kraicer’s lab collaboration (our name for working papers) is now out! It’s about the ways in which gender is represented in contemporary fiction looking at a collection of ca. 26,000 characters. Some of the salient findings: the ratio of women to men characters in […]
Eve Kraicer and I have co-authored a new piece in The Journal of Cultural Analytics. It’s called “Social Characters” and looks at the distribution of gender among characters in a collection of ca. 1,300 contemporary novels. Where previous work has emphasized the growing gender parity […]
Browsing through the history of literature, you are likely to find authors poking fun at their characters for just being words on the page. As George Eliot writes in Middlemarch, “‘He has got no good red blood in his body,’ said Sir James. ‘No somebody put […]
So for my first post, I want to discuss techniques that you can use to find and understand “characters” in literary texts. The tool I will be discussing is called BookNLP and is developed by David Bamman at UC Berkeley. It is a wonderful resource […]
It’s character month at txtLAB, which means I will be talking a lot about characters in books this month (not the ethical kind of character that David Brooks likes). My first post will be about the overall lack of semantic distinction surrounding characters. In other […]
I’m very proud to be part of the collaborative project that produced this new article in the Journal of Cultural Analytics where we outline the process we used to visually detect footnotes in 32 million page images. (Full disclosure: I am the editor and to avoid conflict […]