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…
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…
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…