In honor of the latest meeting of our NEH sponsored Folger workshop, Early Modern Digital Agendas, I wanted to start a series of posts about how we find “distances” between texts in quantitative terms, and about what those distances might mean. Why would I argue that two texts are “closer” to one another than they are to a […]
Author Archives: Michael Witmore
Now Read This: A Thought Experiment
Let’s say that we believe we can learn something more about what literary critics call “authorial style” or “genre” by quantitative work. We want to say what that “more” is. We assemble a community of experts, convening a panel of early modernists to identify 10 plays that they feel are comedies based on prevailing definitions […]
The Novel and Moral Philosophy 3: What Does Lennox Do with Moral Philosophy Words?
The previous two posts explored how an eighteenth century novel uses words from an associated topic to fulfill, and perhaps shape, the expectations of an audience looking to immerse themselves in a life as it is lived. In this post I want to think a little more about the idea that the red words identified […]
Posted in Visualizing English Print (VEP)
Tagged Adam Smith, Charlotte Lennox, Euphemia, moral philosophy, sentiment, Theory of Moral Sentiments
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Adjacencies, Virtuous and Vicious, and the Forking Paths of Library Research
Browsable stacks – shelves of books that you can actually look at, pull off the shelf, read a while, and put back. They’re wonderful. Folger readers regularly comment on the fact that they can walk freely through the stacks of the secondary collection, which in our case means books published after 1830. That collection is […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged browsing, pca, serendipity, subject classification, topics
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The Future of the Humanities Will Be Demand-Led
The following is an unpolished contribution to some recent debates about the wisdom of defending, or ceasing to defend, the humanities. In what follows, I do not discuss what is deep, rich, and wonderful about the humanities. People who already care already know. I believe the public discussion ought to start somewhere else. When I […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged bureaucracy, humanities, Pope Gregory IX, public humanities, Simon During
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