Category: Counting Other Things

  • Auerbach Was Right: A Computational Study of the Odyssey and the Gospels

    Rembrandt, The Denial of St. Peter (1660), Rijksmuseum
    Rembrandt, The Denial of St. Peter (1660), Rijksmuseum

    In the “Fortunata” chapter of his landmark study, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality, Eric Auerbach contrasts two representations of reality, one found in the New Testament Gospels, the other in texts by Homer and a few other classical writers. As with much of Auerbach’s writing, the sweep of his generalizations is broad. Long excerpts are chosen from representative texts. Contrasts and arguments are made as these excerpts are glossed and related to a broader field of texts. Often Auerbach only gestures toward the larger pattern: readers of Mimesis must then generate their own (hopefully congruent) understanding of what the example represents.

    So many have praised Auerbach’s powers of observation and close reading. At the very least, his status as a “domain expert” makes his judgments worth paying attention to in a computational context. In this post, I want to see how a machine would parse the difference between the two types of texts Auerbach analyzes, stacking the iterative model against the perceptions of a master critic. This is a variation on the experiments I have performed with Jonathan Hope, where we take a critical judgment (i.e., someone’s division of Shakespeare’s corpus of plays into genres) and then attempt to reconstruct, at the level of linguistic features, the perception which underlies that judgment. We ask, Can we describe what this person is seeing or reacting to in another way?

    Now, Auerbach never fully states what makes his texts different from one another, which makes this task harder. Readers must infer both the larger field of texts that exemplify the difference Auerbach alludes to, and the difference itself as adumbrated by that larger field. Sharon Marcus is writing an important piece on this allusive play between scales — between reference to an extended excerpt and reference to a much larger literary field. Because so much goes unstated in this game of stand-ins and implied contrasts, the prospect of re-describing Auerbach’s difference in other terms seems particularly daunting. The added difficulty makes for a more interesting experiment.

    Getting at Auerbach’s Distinction by Counting Linguistic Features

    I want to offer a few caveats before outlining what we can learn from a computational comparison of the kinds of works Auerbach refers to in his study. For any of what follows to be relevant or interesting, you must take for granted that the individual books of the Odyssey and the New Testament Gospels (as they exist in translation from Project Gutenberg) represent adequately the texts Auerbach was thinking about in the “Fortunata” chapter. You must grant, too, that the linguistic features identified by Docuscope are useful in elucidating some kind of underlying judgments, even when it is used on texts in translation. (More on the latter and very important point below.) You must further accept that Docuscope, here version 3.91, has all the flaws of a humanly curated tag set. (Docuscope annotates all texts tirelessly and consistently according to procedures defined by its creators.) Finally, you must already agree that Auerbach is a perceptive reader, a point I will discuss at greater length below.

    I begin with a number of excerpts that I hope will give a feel for the contrast in question, if it is a single contrast. This is Auerbach writing in the English translation of Mimesis:

    [on Petronius] As in Homer, a clear and equal light floods the persons and things with which he deals; like Homer, he has leisure enough to make his presentation explicit; what he says can have but one meaning, nothing is left mysteriously in the background, everything is expressed. (26-27)

    [on the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s Epistles] It goes without saying that the stylistic convention of antiquity fails here, for the reaction of the casually involved person can only be presented with the highest seriousness. The random fisherman or publican or rich youth, the random Samaritan or adulteress, come from their random everyday circumstances to be immediately confronted with the personality of Jesus; and the reaction of an individual in such a moment is necessarily a matter of profound seriousness, and very often tragic.” (44)

    [on Gospel of Mark] Generally speaking, direct discourse is restricted in the antique historians to great continuous speeches…But here—in the scene of Peter’s denial—the dramatic tension of the moment when the actors stand face to face has been given a salience and immediacy compared with which the dialogue of antique tragedy appears highly stylized….I hope that this symptom, the use of direct discourse in living dialogue, suffices to characterize, for our purposes, the relation of the writings of the New Testament to classical rhetoric…” (46)

    [on Tacitus] That he does not fall into the dry and unvisualized, is due not only to his genius but to the incomparably successful cultivation of the visual, of the sensory, throughout antiquity. (46)

    [on the story of Peter’s denial] Here we have neither survey and rational disposition, nor artistic purpose. The visual and sensory as it appears here is no conscious imitation and hence is rarely completely realized. It appears because it is attached to the events which are to be related… (47, emphasis mine)

    There is a lot to work with here, and the difference Auerbach is after is probably always going to be a matter of interpretation. The simple contrast seems to be that between the “equal light” that “floods persons and things” in Homer and the “living dialogue” of the Gospels. The classical presentation of reality is almost sculptural in the sense that every aspect of that reality is touched by the artistic designs of the writer. One chisel carves every surface. The rendering of reality in the Gospels, on the other hand, is partial and (changing metaphors here) shadowed. People of all kinds speak, encounter one another in “their random everyday circumstances,” and the immediacy of that encounter is what lends vividness to the story. The visual and sensory “appear…because [they  are] attached to the events which are to be related.” Overt artistry is no longer required to dispose all the details in a single, frieze-like scene. Whatever is vivid becomes so, seemingly, as a consequence of what is said and done, and only as a consequence.

    These are powerful perceptions: they strike many literary critics as accurately capturing something of the difference between the two kinds of writing. It is difficult to say whether our own recognition of these contrasts, speaking now as readers of Auerbach, is the result of any one example or formulation that he offers. It may be the case, as Sharon Marcus is arguing, that Auerbach’s method works by “scaling” between the finely wrought example (in long passages excerpted from the texts he reads) and the broad generalizations that are drawn from them. The fact that I had to quote so many passages from Auerbach suggests that the sources of his own perceptions are difficult to discern.

    Can we now describe those sources by counting linguistic features in the texts Auerbach wants to contrast? What would a quantitative re-description of Auerbach’s claims look like? I attempted to answer these questions by tagging and then analyzing the Project Gutenberg texts of the Odyssey and the Gospels. I used the latest version of Docuscope that is currently being used by the Visualizing English Print team, a program that scans a corpus of texts and then tallies linguistic features according to a hand curated sets of words and phrases called “Language Action Types” (hereafter, “features”). Thanks to the Visualizing English Print project, I can share the raw materials of the analysis. Here you can download the full text of everything being compared. Each text can be viewed interactively according to the features (coded by color) that have been counted. When you open any of these files in a web browser, select a feature to explore by pressing on the feature names to the left. (This “lights up” the text with that feature’s color).

    I encourage you to examine these texts as tagged by Docuscope for yourself. Like me, you will find many individual tagging decisions you disagree with. Because Docuscope assigns every word or phrase to one and only one feature (including the feature, “untagged”), it is doomed to imprecision and can be systematically off base. After some checking, however, I find that the things Docuscope counts happen often and consistently enough that the results are worth thinking about. (Hope and I found this to be the case in our Shakespeare Quarterly article on Shakespeare’s genres.) I always try to examine as many examples of a feature in context as I can before deciding that the feature is worth including in the analysis. Were I to develop this blog post into an article, I would spend considerably more time doing this. But the features included in the analysis here strike me as generally stable, and I have examined enough examples to feel that the errors are worth ignoring.

    Findings

    We can say with statistical confidence (p=<.001) that several of the features identified in this analysis are likely to occur in only one of the two types of writing. These and only these features are the ones I will discuss, starting with an example passage taken from the Odyssey. Names of highlighted features appear on the left hand side of the screen shot below, while words or phrases assigned to those features are highlighted in the text to the right. Again, items highlighted in the following examples appear significantly more often in the Odyssey than in the New Testament Gospels:

    Odyssey, Book 1, Project Gutenberg Text (with discriminating features highlighted)
    Odyssey, Book 1, Project Gutenberg Text (with discriminating features highlighted)

    Book I is bustling with description of the sensuous world. Words in pink describe concrete objects (“wine,” “the house”, “loom”) while those in green describe things involving motion (verbs indicating an activity or change of state). Below are two further examples of such features:

    Screen Shot 2016-01-05 at 8.33.24 AM

    Screen Shot 2016-01-05 at 8.30.03 AM

    Notice also the purple features above, which identify words involved in mediating spatial relationships. (I would quibble with “hearing” and “silence” as being spatial, per the long passage above, but in general I think this feature set is sound.) Finally, in yellow, we find a rather simple thing to tag: quotation marks at the beginning and end of a paragraph, indicating a long quotation.

    Continuing on to a shorter set of examples, orange features in the passages below and above identify the sensible qualities of a thing described, while blue elements indicate words that extend narrative description (“. When she” “, and who”) or words that indicate durative intervals of time (“all night”). Again, these are words and phrases that are more prevalent in the Homeric text:

    Screen Shot 2016-01-05 at 8.42.56 AM

    Screen Shot 2016-01-08 at 8.32.49 AM

    Screen Shot 2016-01-08 at 8.37.28 AM

    The items in cyan, particularly “But” and “, but”  are interesting, since both continue a description by way of contrast. This translation of the Odyssey is full of such contrastive words, for example, “though”, “yet,” “however”, “others”, many of which are mediated by Greek particles in the original.

    When quantitative analysis draws our attention to these features, we see that Auerbach’s distinction can indeed be tracked at this more granular level. Compared with the Gospels, the Odyssey uses significantly more words that describe physical and sensible objects of experience, contributing to what Auerbach calls the “successful cultivation of the visual.” For these texts to achieve the effects Auerbach describes, one might say that they can’t not use concrete nouns alongside adjectives that describe sensuous properties of things. Fair enough.

    Perhaps more interesting, though, are those features below in blue (signifying progression, duration, addition) and cyan (contrastive particles), features that manage the flow of what gets presented in the diegesis. If the Odyssey can’t not use these words and phrases to achieve the effect Auerbach is describing, how do they contribute to the overall impression? Let’s look at another sample from the opening book of the Odyssey, now with a few more examples of these cyan and blue words:

    Odyssey, Book 1, Project Gutenberg Text (with discriminating features highlighted)
    Odyssey, Book 1, Project Gutenberg Text (with discriminating features highlighted)

    While this is by no means the only interpretation of the role of the words highlighted here, I would suggest that phrases such as “when she”, “, and who”, or “, but” also create the even illumination of reality to which Auerbach alludes. We would have to look at many more examples to be sure, but these types of words allow the chisel to remain on the stone a little longer; they continue a description by in-folding contrasts or developments within a single narrative flow.

    Let us now turn to the New Testament Gospels, which lack the above features but contain others to a degree that is statistically significant (i.e., we are confident that the generally higher measurements of these new features in the Gospels are not so by chance, and vice versa). I begin with a longer passage from Matthew 22, then a short passage from Peter’s denial of Jesus at Matthew 26:71. Please note that the colors employed below correspond to different features than they do in the passages above:

    Gospel of Matthew, Project Gutenberg Text (with discriminating features highlighted)
    Matthew 22, Project Gutenberg Text (with discriminating features highlighted)

    Matthew 26:71, Project Gutenberg Text (with discriminating features highlighted)

    The dialogical nature of the Gospels is obvious here. Features in blue, indicating reports of communication events, are indispensable for representing dialogical exchange (“he says”, “said”, “She says”). Features in orange, which indicate uses of the third person pronoun, are also integral to the representation of dialogue; they indicate who is doing the saying. The features in yellow represent (imperfectly, I think) words that reference entities carrying communal authority, words such as “lordship,” “minister,” “chief,” “kingdom.” (Such words do not indicate that the speaker recognizes that authority.) Here again it is unsurprising that the Gospels, which contrast spiritual and secular forms of obligation, would be obliged to make repeated reference to such authoritative entities.

    Things that happen less often may also play a role in differentiating these two kinds of texts. Consider now a group of features that, while present to a higher and statistically significant degree in the Gospels, are nevertheless relatively infrequent in comparison to the dialogical features immediately above. We are interested here in the words highlighted in purple, pink, gray and green:

    Matthew 13:5-6, Project Gutenberg Text (with discriminating features highlighted)

    Matthew 27:54, Project Gutenberg Text (with discriminating features highlighted)

    Matthew 23:16-17, Project Gutenberg Text (with discriminating features highlighted)

    Features in purple mark the process of “reason giving”; they identify moments when a reader or listener is directed to consider the cause of something, or to consider an action’s (spiritually prior) moral justification. In the quotation from Matthew 13, this form of backward looking justification takes the form of a parable (“because they had not depth…”). The English word “because” translates a number of ancient Greek words (διὰ, ὅτι); even a glance at the original raises important questions about how well this particular way of handling “reason giving” in English tracks the same practice in the original language. (Is there a qualitative parity here? If so, can that parity be tracked quantitatively?) In any event, the practice of letting a speaker — Jesus, but also others — reason aloud about causal or moral dependencies seems indispensable to the evangelical programme of the Gospels.

    To this rhetoric of “reason giving” we can add another of proverbiality. The word “things”  in pink (τὰ in the Greek) is used more frequently in the Gospels, as are words such as “whoever,” which appears here in gray (for Ὃς and ὃς). We see comparatively higher numbers of the present tense form of the verb “to be” in the Gospels as well, here highlighted in green (“is” for ἐστιν). (See the adage, “many are called, but few are chosen” in the longer Gospel passage from Matthew 22 excerpted above, translating Πολλοὶ γάρ εἰσιν κλητοὶ ὀλίγοι δὲ ἐκλεκτοί.)

    These features introduce a certain strategic indefiniteness to the speech situation: attention is focused on things that are true from the standpoint of time immemorial or prophecy. (“Things” that just “are” true, “whatever” the case, “whoever” may be involved.). These features move the narrative into something like an “evangelical present” where moral reasoning and prophecy replace description of sensuous reality. In place of concrete detail, we get proverbial generalization. One further effect of this rhetoric of proverbiality is that the searchlight of narrative interest is momentarily dimmed, at least as a source illuminating an immediate physical reality.

    What Made Auerbach “Right,” And Why Can We Still See It?

    What have we learned from this exercise? Answering the most basic question, we can say that, after analyzing the frequency of a limited set of verbal features occurring in these two types of text (features tracked by Docuscope 3.91), we find that some of those features distribute unevenly across the corpus, and do so in a way that tracks the two types of texts Auerbach discusses. We have arrived, then, at a statistically valid description of what makes these two types of writing different, one that maps intelligibly onto the conceptual distinctions Auerbach makes in his own, mostly allusive analysis. If the test was to see if we can re-describe Auerbach’s insights by other means, Auerbach passes the test.

    But is it really Auerbach who passes? I think Auerbach was already “right” regardless of what the statistics say. He is right because generations of critics recognize his distinction. What we were testing, then, was not whether Auerbach was “right,” but whether a distinction offered by this domain expert could be re-described by other means, at the level of iterated linguistic features. The distinction Auerbach offered in Mimesis passes the re-description test, and so we say, “Yes, that can be done.” Indeed, the largest sources of variance in this corpus — features with the highest covariance — seem to align independently with, and explicitly elaborate, the mimetic strategies Auerbach describes. If we have hit upon something here, it is not a new discovery about the texts themselves. Rather, we have found an alternate description of the things Auerbach may be reacting to. The real object of study here is the reaction of a reader.

    Why insist that it is a reader’s reactions and not the texts themselves that we are describing? Because we cannot somehow deposit the sum total of the experience Auerbach brings to his reading in the “container” that is a text. Even if we are making exhaustive lists of words or features in texts, the complexity we are interested in is the complexity of literary judgment. This should not be surprising. We wouldn’t need a thing called literary criticism if what we said about the things we read exhausted or fully described that experience. There’s an unstatable fullness to our experience when we read. The enterprise of criticism is the ongoing search for ever more explicit descriptions of this fullness. Critics make gains in explicitness by introducing distinctions and examples. In this case, quantitative analysis extends the basic enterprise, introducing another searchlight that provides its own, partial illumination.

    This exercise also suggests that a mimetic strategy discernible in one language survives translation into another. Auerbach presents an interesting case for thinking about such survival, since he wrote Mimesis while in exile in Istanbul, without immediate access to all of the sources he wants to analyze. What if Auerbach was thinking about the Greek texts of these works while writing the “Fortunata” chapter? How could it be, then, that at least some of what he was noticing in the Greek carries over into English via translation, living to be counted another day? Readers of Mimesis who do not know ancient Greek still see what Auerbach is talking about, and this must be because the difference between classical and New Testament mimesis depends on words or features that can’t be omitted in a reasonably faithful translation. Now a bigger question comes into focus. What does it mean to say that both Auerbach and the quantitative analysis converge on something non-negotiable that distinguishes these the two types of writing? Does it make sense to call this something “structural”?

    If you come from the humanities, you are taking a deep breath right about now. “Structure” is a concept that many have worked hard to put in the ground. Here is a context, however, in which that word may still be useful. Structure or structures, in the sense I want to use these words, refers to whatever is non-negotiable in translation and, therefore, available for description or contrast in both qualitative and quantitative terms. Now, there are trivial cases that we would want to reject from this definition of structure. If I say that the Gospels are different from the Odyssey because the word Jesus occurs more frequently in the former, I am talking about something that is essential but not structural. (You could create a great “predictor” of whether a text is a Gospel by looking for the word “Jesus,” but no one would congratulate you.)

    If I say, pace Auerbach, that the Gospels are more dialogical than the Homeric texts, and so that English translations of the same must more frequently use phrases like “he said,” the difference starts to feel more inbuilt. You may become even more intrigued to find that other, less obvious features contribute to that difference which Auerbach hadn’t thought to describe (for example, the present tense forms of “to be” in the Gospels, or pronouns such as “whoever” or “whatever”). We could go further and ask, Would it really be possible to create an English translation of Homer or the Gospels that fundamentally avoids dialogical cues, or severs them from the other features observed here? Even if, like the translator of Perec’s La Disparition, we were extremely clever in finding a way to avoid certain features, the resulting translation would likely register the displacement in another form. (That difference would live to be counted another way.) To the extent that we have identified a set of necessary, indispensable, “can’t not occur” features for the mimetic practice under discussion, we should be able to count it in both the original language as well as a reasonably faithful translation.

    I would conjecture that for any distinction to be made among literary texts, there must be a countable correlate in translation for the difference being proposed. No correlate, no critical difference — at least, if we are talking about a difference a reader could recognize. Whether what is distinguished through such differences is a “structure,” a metaphysical essence, or a historical convention is beside the point. The major insight here is that the common ground between traditional literary criticism and the iterative, computational analysis of texts is that both study “that which survives translation.” There is no better or more precise description of our shared object of study.

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    591 Early Modern Dramas plotted in PCA space, with 'core' group circled and variation boundary marked (line)
    591 Early Modern Dramas plotted in PCA space, with ‘core’ group circled and variation boundary marked (line)

    American/Australian tour

    In March-April 2014, I’ll be in the USA giving a series of talks and conference presentations based around Visualising English Print, and our other work. In June I’ll be in Newcastle, Australia for the very exciting Beyond Authorship symposium.

    I’ll address a series of different themes in the talks, but I’ll use this page as a single resource for references, since they are all (in my head at least) related.

    Some of the talks will be theoretical/state of the field; some will be specific demonstrations of tools. The common thread is something like, ‘what do we think we are doing?’.

    Here’s a general introduction (there’s a list of venues afterwards).

     

    1 Counting things

    Quantification is certainly not new in literary criticism, but it is becoming more noticeable, and, perhaps, more central as critics analyse increasingly large corpora. The statistical tools we use to explore complex data sets (such as Shakespeare’s plays or 20,000 texts from EEBO-TCP) may appear like magical black boxes: feed in the numbers, print out the diagrams, wow your audience. But what is happening to our texts in those black boxes? Scary mathematical things we can’t hope to understand or critique?

    I want to consider the nature of the transformations we perform on texts when we subject them to statistical analysis. To some extent this is analogous to ‘traditional’ literary criticism: we have a text, and we identify other texts that are similar or different to it:

    How does Hamlet relate to other Early Modern tragedies?

    This is a question equally suited to quantitative digital analysis, and traditional literary critical approaches. The ways we define and approach our terms will differ between the two modes, as will the evidence employed, but essentially both answers to this question would involve comparison and assessment of degrees of similarity and difference.

    But there is also something very different to traditional literary criticism going on when we count things in texts and analyse the resulting spreadsheets – something literary scholars may feel unable to understand or critique. What exactly are we doing when we ‘project’ texts into hyper-dimensional spaces and use statistical tools to reduce those spaces down to something we can ‘read’ as humans?

    Perhaps surprisingly, studying library architecture, book history, information science, and cataloguing systems may help us to think about this. Libraries organised by subject ‘project’ their books into three-dimensional space, so that books with similar content are found next to each other. Many statistical procedures function similarly, projecting books into hyper-dimensional spaces, and then using distance metrics to identify proximity and distance within the complex mathematical spaces our analysis creates.

    Once we understand the geometry of statistical comparison, we can grasp the potential literary significance of the associations identified by counting – and we can begin to understand the difference between statistical significance and literary significance, and see that it is the job of the literary scholar, not the statistician, to decide on the latter. A result can be statistically significant, but of no interest in literary terms – and findings that do not qualify for statistical significance may be crucial for a literary argument.

     

    2 Evidence

    Ted Underwood has been posing lots of challenging, and productive, questions for literary scholars doing, or thinking about, digital work. Perhaps most significant is his recent suggestion that the digital causes problems for literary scholars, who are used to basing their arguments, and narratives, on ‘turning points’ and exceptions. Digital evidence, however, collected at scale, tells stories about continuity and gradual change. A possible implication of this is that the shift to digital analysis and evidence will fundamentally change the nature of literary studies, as we break away from a model that has arguably been with us only since the Romantics, and return (?) to one which traces long continuities in genre and form.

    One way of posing this question: does the availability of large digital corpora and tools put us at the dawn of a new world, or are we just in for more (a lot more) of the same?

     

    3 Dates and Venues

    28 March 2014: Renaissance Society of America Plenary Session: Current Trends in the Digital Renaissance (7.00-8.30pm); New York Hilton Midtown, Sutton Rooms: ‘Paradigm Shifts in British Renaissance Literature: The Digital Future’ #rsa14

    2 April 2014: CUNY Graduate Centre, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York (2.00-4.00pm); Room 6495: ‘Flatlands: book history, literary criticism, and hyper-dimensional geometry’

    7 April 2014: University of Pennsylvania,Digital Humanities Forum (12-1.30pm); Room 625-6 Penn Library (Registration required): ‘Visualising English Print’

    Graduate Class: Shakespeare and the History of the Book: ‘The Language of Macbeth‘; preparatory reading: ‘Macbeth language HW2014’  not a public event

    10 April 2014: Shakespeare Association of America, St Louis: 10-12 Seminar: ‘Shakespeare’s language: close and distant reading’; 12-1.30 and 3-6: Digital Projects Room: Visualising English Print; Translation Arrays (project demonstrations)

     

    4 References and resources (these are grouped by topic)

    (a) Statistics and hyper-dimensionality

    Mick Alt, 1990, Exploring Hyperspace: A Non-Mathematical Explanation of Multivariate Analysis (London: McGraw-Hill) – the best book on hyper-dimensionality in statistical analysis: short, clear, and conceptually focussed

    Most standard statistics textbooks give accounts of Principal Component Analysis (and Factor Analysis, to which it is closely related). We have found Andy Field, Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics: And Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll (London: 2013, 4th ed.) useful.

    Curiously, Early Modern drama, in the shape of Shakespeare, has a significant history in attempts to imagine hyper-dimensional worlds. E.A. Abbott, the author of A Shakespearian Grammar (London, 1870), also wrote Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (London, 1884), an early science fiction work full of Shakespeare references and set in a two-dimensional universe.

    Flatland_cover

    The significance of Flatland to many who work in higher-dimensional geometry is shown by a recent scholarly edition sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America (Cambridge, 2010 – editors William F. Lindgren and Thomas F. Banchoff), and its use in physicist Lisa Randall’s account of theories of multiple dimensionality, Warped Passageways (New York, 2005), pages 11-28 (musical interlude: Dopplereffekt performing Calabi-Yau Space – which refers to a theory of hyper-dimensionality).

    Flatland itself is the subject of a conceptual, dimensional transformation at the hands of poet/artist Derek Beaulieu:

    Derek Beaulieu, 2007, Flatland: a romance of many dimensions (York: information as material)

     

    (b) Libraries and information science

    In thinking about the physical development of libraries, I have enjoyed

    James W.P. Campbell and Will Pryce, 2013, The Library: A World History (London: Thames and Hudson) [- a beautiful book, and images are available on Will Pryce’s blog]

    and

    Richard Gameson, 2006, ‘The medieval library (to c. 1450)’, Clare Sargent, 2006, ‘The early modern library (to c. 1640), and David McKitterick, 2006, ‘Libraries and the organisation of knowledge’, in Elizabeth Leedham-Green and Teressa Webber (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland vol. 1, ‘To 1640’, pp. 13-50, 51-65, and 592-615

    and also, on real and imagined libraries:

    Craig Dworkin, 2010, The Perverse Library (York: information as material)

    Alec Finlay, 2001, The Libraries of Thought and Imagination (Edinburgh: Polygon Pocketbooks)

    Alberto Manguel, 2006, The Library at Night (New Haven: Yale)

    Roberto Bolaño, 2008 [1996], Nazi Literature in the Americas (New York: New Directions)

    Jane Rickard, 2013, ‘Imagining the early modern library: Ben Jonson and his contemporaries’ (unpublished paper presented at Strathclyde University Languages and Literatures Seminar)

     

    On data, information management and catalogues:

    Ann M. Blair, 2010, Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale)

    Markus Krajewski, 2011, Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs 1548-1929 (Cambridge, MSS: MIT) – on Conrad Gessner

    Daniel Rosenberg, 2013, ‘Data before the Fact’, in Lisa Gitelman (ed), Raw Data is an Oxymoron (Cambridge, MSS: MIT), pp. 15-40 – combines digital analysis with a historicisation of the field, and the notion of ‘data’

     

    (c) Ted Underwood and the digital future

    Ted Underwood, 2013, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford) – especially chapter 6, ‘Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History’, pp. 157-75 – on the strange commitment to discontinuity in literary studies, and the tendency of digital/at scale work to dissolve this into a picture of gradualism – Underwood cites his own work as an e.g. of the resistance scholars using quantification find within themselves to gradualism – and notes the temptation to seek fracture/outlier/turning point narrative

    (also see Underwood’s discussion with Andrew Piper on Piper’s blog: http://bookwasthere.org/?p=1571 – balancing numbers and literary analysis – and Andrew Piper, 2012, Book There Was: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago) – see chapter 7, ‘By The Numbers’ on computation, DH).

    Ted Underwood and Jordan Sellers, 2012, ‘The Emergence of Literary Diction’, Journal of Digital Humanities, 1.2 (Underwood 2013: 166-70 discusses this paper as an example of the pull to ‘event’ narrative in literary history, despite the gradualism in quantitative work).

     

    Also related:  Underwood’s blog: ‘The Stone and the Shell’ http://tedunderwood.com

    Scottbot ‘Bridging Token and Type’ http://www.scottbot.net/HIAL/?p=40088

     

    ‘longue durée’ History – Underwood has suggested that historians are more comfortable than literary scholars with the ‘long view’ that tends to come with digital evidence, and David Armitage and Jo Guldi have been arguing that the digital is shifting history back to this mode:

    David Armitage and Jo Guldi, 2014, ‘The Return of the Longue Durée: An Anglo-American Perspective’, forthcoming (in French) in Annales. Histoire Sciences sociales, 69 [English version: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/armitage/files/rld_annales_revised_0.pdf]

    David Armitage, 2012, ‘What’s the big idea? Intellectual history and the longue durée’, History of European Ideas, 38.4, pp. 493-507

     

    (d) Overview/examples of Digital work:

    Early Modern Digital Agendas was an NEH-funded Institute held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2013. The EMDA website has an extensive list of resources for Digital work focussed on the Early Modern period.

    Text

    An excellent account of starting text-analytic work by a newcomer to the field:

    http://earlymodernconversions.com/computer-based-textual-analysis-and-early-modern-literature-notes-on-some-recent-research/

     

    Network

    http://sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com

     

    Geo-spatial

    An example of an info-heavy, ‘reference’ site that makes excellent use of maps – The Museum of the Scottish Shale Oil Industry (!):  http://www.scottishshale.co.uk

    http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca

     

    Image

    British Printed Images to 1700

    Large number of heavy-weight funders/participants

    Bpi1700 makes a database of  ‘thousands’ of prints and book illustrations available ‘in fully-searchable form’. However, searching is text-based (see http://www.bpi1700.org.uk/jsp/)

    Development halted?  ‘Although the main development work has been completed, improvements will continue to be made from time to time. If you have problems or suggestions please contact the project (see the ‘contact’ page).’                             http://www.bpi1700.org.uk/index.html

    ‘Print of the month’ ended May/June 2009 http://www.bpi1700.org.uk/research/printOfTheMonth/print.html

     

    Japanese woodblock prints                                                 http://ukiyo-e.org

    The Ukiyo-e Search site is an amazing resource that represents something genuinely new (rather than just an extension of previously existing word-based catalogue searching), in that it allows searching via an uploaded image. For example, a researcher can upload a phone-image of a print she discovers in a library, and see if the same/similar prints have been previously described, and how many other libraries have copies or versions of the print. The search is ‘fuzzy’ and will often detect different states of altered woodblocks. [Thanks to @GilesBergel for the news that a similar functionality is coming to the Bodleian Ballads project.]

    ‘About’ page with demonstration video:                http://ukiyo-e.org/about

    The Ukiyo-e site was created by one person, John Resig, an enthusiast for Ukiyo-e, who saw the need for the site as a research tool. Development and expansion on-going.

    ‘The database currently contains over 213,000 prints from 24 institutions and, as of September 2013, has received 3.4 million page views from 150,000 people.’                                                                                                                         http://ukiyo-e.org/about

     

    And finally, pictures of my kittens Arthur and Gracie, who will feature in the talks:

    IMG_0827
    Arthur can work a computer (he wrote the title of this post).

     

     

     

    Arthur and Gracie
    Arthur and Gracie
  • Manuscript Average

    Here’s a terrific post about examining manuscripts pages as image aggregates by Jesse Hurlbut, entitled “Manuscript Average.” Below, 331 folios from Guillaume Fillastre, La Toison d’Or, livre I, BNF Fr 138.

    BNF Fr 138 (165 folios)

  • New Image from Original Post from Google Books

    We had a request for a clearer version of the image we discussed in our post last year, which shows changes in the catalogued subject of Library of Congress books over the course of several hundred years. Jon Orwant from Google was kind enough to send an updated image, which we’re sharing here. I include below his description of the visualization.

    “The visualization…was derived exclusively from the metadata feed of the Library of Congress. The LoC catalog doesn’t restrict itself to American or even English language books, but likely does have some sample bias (as every union catalog does).”

  • What is influence?

    Offline, we’ve been discussing The New York Times‘ article on Matt Jockers’ work, and the notion that iterative/digital analysis might be able to track literary influence.

    My first reaction to these articles was that it would be hard to track something as high-level as influence with word counts.

    But then I remembered that I would have said the same thing about genre several years ago.

    I suspect the problem is not really the ability to track influence – let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that it leaves textual evidence just like genre does.

    The problem is that I don’t think we have a stable definition of what influence is – so it is hard to make an educated guess about which countable features might track influence. And that is a problem for literary scholars to solve, not computer scientists. (Though I might be proved wrong on this when Matt Jockers’ book comes out.)

    With genre, we have lots of theories of what it is, and, more importantly, many lists of plays put into generic categories for us to test. So we had real things to test when we started to look at the linguistic fingerprints of generic groups, even though we did not then know what features might encode genre at the level of the sentence.

    The problems with defining ‘influence’ became clear to me when I read this piece:

    http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/without-austen-no-eliot.html

    on the ‘influence’ of Jane Austen on George Eliot, which even cites empirical evidence in terms of demonstrating Eliot’s interest in, and re-reading of Austen. I think it goes very well with the NYT piece on Jockers, and gives a sense of the slippery nature of ‘influence’.

    The piece argues for Austen’s influence on Eliot (no Austen, no Eliot), but this influence isn’t really described – an unkind parody of it might say that the argument boils down to ‘Austen influenced Eliot to write long prose narratives which are called novels’.

    Indeed, the article spends more time talking about the differences between the two, rather than the similarities.

    So what exactly is ‘influence’ in literary terms? Jockers’ work identifies similarity with influence (or at least the newspaper reports do) – and this is a sensible first step. But is literary influence the use of similar frequencies of function words? Or does similarity at a higher level (plot, character-choreography, the use of certain types of point of view) produce similarities in linguistic frequencies?

    Des Higham, professor of statistics at Strathclyde is doing some interesting work producing algorithms to track the ‘influence’ of certain twitter-users over others, following responses to TV programmes. But with Twitter, you can measure ‘influence’ in terms of retweets. In what sense was George Eliot re-tweeting Jane Austen?

    jh

    UPDATE: There is a *very* interesting discussion of influence and Matt Jockers’ work here (Bill Benzon’s blog New Savanna).