It’s like hitting a painting with a fish. This was the quip that a well-known British novelist made when asked about using computation to study literature. You could, but why would you? I think it’s becoming increasingly clear to people all of the ways data …
In 1967, Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle. In it, he tried to show us how virtual real life had become, that is, the extent to which social and political life was increasingly dominated by media and mediation. The recent Canadian election made …
A lot of the hoopla around big data has revolved around a hierarchy of scale. Many businesses and organizations don’t quite understand how much data is required for their needs. More often than not, they need to find the best residential proxy that will be …
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “That’s right.” – Sunspring, a film written by AI The term gonzo data science was used by the creator of the AI that was used to write Sunspring. He works at Google. Gonzo journalism was a term coined …
I’m on sabbatical this year. It will officially begin on Tuesday when classes normally start. I’ll be in a cabin somewhere, enjoying some me time. I’ve wanted to go to a cabin for ages. I just wanted to pack up all of my belongings and …
I am very excited for our *fifth* (!) annual NovelTM conference coming up this week. The aim of this year’s conference is to begin the long overdue conversation between data-driven research and literary scholarship more generally. The particular theme of the conference will centre around the …
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 …