As part of BookNet Canada‘s on-going webinar series, I recently held a webinar on using data analytics to “debias” books. A lot of discussion has begun in publishing with respect to increasing the diversity of publishers’ lists. The issue is often seen as one that…
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…
McGill hosted its annual event to showcase the work of undergraduate summer research projects. Among the many amazing projects was .txtLAB’s Victoria Svaikovsky who led a research project with two other students, Anne Meisner and Eve Kraicer-Melamed, on studying the intersections of race and Hollywood…
In their simplest form, computers work in binary. There are ones, and there are zeros and all the rest is context and combinations building more and more complex functions off of that binary. So it is maybe unsurprising that at .txtLAB, when we are dealing…
The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a version of our essay on the concentration of institutional prestige as its cover story this week. In it we expand our reflections about how to change the current system. The essay is based on our original piece that…
I am pleased to announce the publication of a new piece out with Chad Wellmon in Critical Inquiry entitled, “Publication, Power, and Patronage: On Inequality and Academic Publishing.” In it we discuss the concentration of a few elite institutions within a sample of four humanities…
We are excited to announce the 2017-2018 Internship in Cultural Advocacy, focusing on gender bias in book reviews. The internship will address how women are both mis-represented and under-represented in the public discourse of book reviewing. Book reviews represent a significant cultural outlet that bestows authority, but as our…