Advances in the Visualization of Data: The Network of Genre in the Victorian Periodical Press

DeWitt, Anne

doi:10.1353/vpr.2015.0030

Cited by 15 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Anne DeWitt () also deals with the issue of genre in the periodical press. She notes that Moretti has defined genre simply by looking at features of novels without taking readers into account.…”

Section: Taking Root: Dh and Victorian Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Victorian roots and branches: “The statistical century” as foundation to the digital humanities

Babb

2018

Literature Compass

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Victorian Studies and the Digital Humanities (DH) are a natural fit; Victorian texts are in the public domain and thus available for full digitization and subjection to all kinds of applications. This essay focuses on arguably the most controversial: the use of statistical methodologies to analyze literary texts. Often aimed at the “distant reading” practices of Franco Moretti, the pros and cons of these methods have been widely debated among literary scholars, but with little reference to their historical roots. Historical accounts of DH have instead focused on technological developments, citing the massive, computerized concordance of the works of Thomas Aquinas, envisioned in 1949 by Father Roberto Busa and realized by IBM over the next 20 years, as the moment DH was born. Such accounts, as useful as they are, neglect important connections between the computational methodologies of DH and the emergence of modern statistical methodology during the nineteenth century. The advantage of seeing DH as part of the history of statistics is that it helps us understand and evaluate statistically based DH methodologies in their own terms and not simply as methodologies associated with particular neoliberal institutions in the present. This essay argues that understanding the history of statistics as well as examining current practice helps address the criticisms leveled at computational methodologies and the question of compatibility with traditional humanistic methodologies such as close reading. It begins with a brief history of the emergence of modern statistics in the nineteenth century and the impact on Victorian literature and popular culture and then examines recent DH scholarship that utilizes statistical methodologies to analyze Victorian texts.

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Section: Taking Root: Dh and Victorian Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Victorian roots and branches: “The statistical century” as foundation to the digital humanities

Babb

2018

Literature Compass

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“…In "The Slaughterhouse of Literature" Franco Moretti (2000) was already posing questions about canon formation, and a recent flurry of projects show sharply increased interest in reception (e.g., Algee-Hewitt et al 2016;DeWitt 2015).…”

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confidence: 99%

TheLongue Duréeof Literary Prestige

Underwood¹,

Sellers²

2016

Modern Language Quarterly

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A history of literary prestige needs to study both works that achieved distinction and the mass of volumes from which they were distinguished. To understand how those patterns of preference changed across a century, we gathered two samples of English-language poetry from the period 1820-1919: one drawn from volumes reviewed in prominent periodicals and one selected at random from a large digital library (in which the majority of authors are relatively obscure). The stylistic differences associated with literary prominence turn out to be quite stable: a statistical model trained to distinguish reviewed from random volumes in any quarter of this century can make predictions almost as accurate about the rest of the period. The "poetic revolutions" described by many histories are not visible in this model; instead, there is a steady tendency for new volumes of poetry to change by slightly exaggerating certain features that defined prestige in the recent past.

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“…;Style, Inc. (2009); DavidElson et al (2010);Jockers and Mimno (2013);Underwood et al (2013);Piper and Algee-Hewitt (2014);and Dewitt (2015). Also see Special issue on topic models and the cultural sciences, John Mohr and Petko Bogdanov(eds) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2013.08.005 (accessed 2 October 2015).…”

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confidence: 99%

The fictionality of topic modeling: Machine reading Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series

Buurma

2015

Big Data & Society

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This essay describes how using unsupervised topic modeling (specifically the latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling algorithm in MALLET) on relatively small corpuses can help scholars of literature circumvent the limitations of some existing theories of the novel. Using an example drawn from work on Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series, it argues that unsupervised topic modeling's counter-factual and retrospective reconstruction of the topics out of which a given set of novels have been created allows for a denaturalizing and unfamiliar (though crucially not ''objective '' or ''unbiased'') view. In other words, topic models are fictions, and scholars of literature should consider reading them as such. Drawing on one aspect of Stephen Ramsay's idea of algorithmic criticism, the essay emphasizes the continuities between ''big data'' methods and techniques and longer-standing methods of literary study.

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Advances in the Visualization of Data: The Network of Genre in the Victorian Periodical Press

Cited by 15 publications

References 14 publications

Victorian roots and branches: “The statistical century” as foundation to the digital humanities

Victorian roots and branches: “The statistical century” as foundation to the digital humanities

TheLongue Duréeof Literary Prestige

The fictionality of topic modeling: Machine reading Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series

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