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…
Not to brag, but it’s almost impressive how many times I got something so simple so profoundly wrong, in so many odd ways.
I made the a list the other day of all of the letters, names, and new terms I have had to learn to undertake the computational study of literature and culture. It was very long. It made me realize that when researchers speak of the…
I wanted to share an experiment that I worked on with Mark Algee-Hewitt to reconstruct the table of contents of our new collaboratively authored book, Interacting with Print. The book was written by 22 co-authors around the theme of interactivity. Mark and I thought it…
Lab member Fedor Karmanov has created a beautiful new project that combines machine vision, machine learning, and poetry. It is called “1,000 Words,” and takes the self-portraits of Van Gogh and generates poems based on the colours and items in the portrait. The poems consist…
I listened to a beautiful podcast the other day by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on “the danger of the single story.” Her point was that when we only tell one kind of story about a person or a place we cheapen our understanding. She began with…
I gave a talk today with Paul Yachnin to the McGill Community for Lifelong Learning on “Conscientious AI.” The idea for the event was to give the audience some understanding of how machine learning works and what you might do with it. We then asked…
This is the name of a new piece I have out in PMLA in a section called “Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading.” The first point I try to make is that calling it “Moretti’s Distant Reading” is indicative of literary studies’ continued penchant for great men.…