Toward a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space

Tenen, Dennis

doi:10.1353/nlh.2018.0005

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…A recent example of comes from Dennis Yi Tenen, who used a combination of lexical and syntactic markers to operationalize the idea of "clutter" (i.e., the density of objects in a scene) in fiction. 7 Here the spatial density of an imagined space maps to a quantifiable density on the written line.…”

Section: Difference As Distancementioning

confidence: 99%

Divergence and the Complexity of Difference in Text and Culture

Chang¹,

DeDeo²

2020

Journal of Cultural Analytics

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Measuring how much two documents differ is a basic task in the quantitative analysis of text. Because difference is a complex, interpretive concept, researchers often operationalize difference as distance, a mathematical function that represents documents through a metaphor of physical space. Yet the constraints of that metaphor mean that distance can only capture some of the ways that documents can relate to each other. We show how a more general concept, divergence, can help solve this problem, alerting us to new ways in which documents can relate to each other. In contrast to distance, divergence can capture enclosure relationships, where two documents differ because the patterns found in one are a partial subset of those in the other, and the emergence of shortcuts, where two documents can be brought closer through mediation by a third. We provide an example of this difference measure, Kullback-Leibler Divergence, and apply it to two worked examples: the presentation of scientific arguments in Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and the rhetorical structure of philosophical texts by Aristotle, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. These examples illuminate the complex relationship between time and what we refer to as an archive's "enclosure architecture", and show how divergence can be used in the quantitative analysis of historical, literary, and cultural texts to reveal cognitive structures invisible to spatial metaphors. Those who study culture look for differences. Just as ethnographers might study the differences between the practices of regions, villages, or families, 1 literary scholars might study the differences between genres, modes, or periods. 2 Those who approach culture from a quantitative standpoint are no exception, and we are often tasked with the goal of measuring the differences between different, computationally identified, patterns of expression. 3 In the digital analysis of texts, for example, we might ask how much two documents or sets of documents differ, and relate these differences to other aspects of psychological or social life. 4

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Section: Difference As Distancementioning

confidence: 99%

Divergence and the Complexity of Difference in Text and Culture

Chang¹,

DeDeo²

2020

Journal of Cultural Analytics

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“…21 In "Toward a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space", Dennis Yi Tenen too argues that a "space can be understood through things". 22 All these theoretical approaches to space in text seem to agree that, when the analysis is not interested in the narrated space's topography, space can be conceptualized as the sum of its linguistic components. As a result, for the purposes of this study, space in text is modeled as the sum of terms that indicate units and objects found in urban landscapes.…”

Section: Urban Space As Token-countsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Computational Approach to Urban Space in Science Fiction

Bologna¹

2020

Journal of Cultural Analytics

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This study analyzes the presence of urban space in 20th century science fiction in English using computational methods. Three theoretical approaches are used to model urban space as a measurable feature. First, urban space is formalized as a topic. LDA topic modeling is used to retrieve the urban topic from the corpus and estimate its presence in each book. Secondly, urban space is formalized as the sum of the linguistic fragments that form a setting. A list of urban terms is created and their frequency is measured for each novel. Lastly, cityspace is formalized as the number of references to urban locations. Textual Geographies' geographic data was used to measure the presence of named urban locations in each book. The results of these approaches all point to similar conclusions. A low presence of urban space is found in science fiction compared to general fiction, alongside a historical trend. Urban presence in science fiction is greater at the beginning of the 20th century, declines in the 30s and 40s, and successively increases in the 50s. No such dip is present in other types of fiction across the twentieth century.

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“…Thus, digital approaches to journalism history not only bring about questions of distant reading supplanting close readings, but also suggest what distant readings can reveal about new and interesting ways to approach specific texts and time periods in new ways. In a recent study of "fictional space" through computational methods, Tenen (2018) describes such an approach rather well when he writes that "the formal, computational methods … occasion opportunities for close reading, and not just reading at scale. My methods are diagnostic, in that they identify areas of interest and unusual trends that require closer critical attention" (Tenen 2018, 120).…”

Section: Reading Archival Contentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Journalism History and Digital Archives

Bødker

2018

Digital Journalism

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Toward a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space

Cited by 11 publications

References 38 publications

Divergence and the Complexity of Difference in Text and Culture

Divergence and the Complexity of Difference in Text and Culture

A Computational Approach to Urban Space in Science Fiction

Journalism History and Digital Archives

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