In this post I attempt to isolate what I take to be three basic critical gestures that are performed in both “traditional” and “iterative” literary criticism. These gestures are: pointing, circling, and naming. Before giving examples of these three gestures, a few words about what makes them possible in digital work: establishing a corpus, defining […]
Category Archives: Quant Theory
What did Stanley Fish count, and when did he start counting it?
We have been observing the reaction to Stanley Fish’s critique of the Digital Humanities with great interest. Here is the full text of our comment, which could only be partially displayed on the New York Times comment window. You know you’ve come up in the world if you’re being needled by Stanley Fish in The […]
Finding the Sherlock in Shakespeare: some ideas about prose genre and linguistic uniqueness
An unexpected point of linguistic similarity between plot-driven mystery fiction and Shakespeare plays lead to a consideration of textual similarities that remain invisible in the normal process of reading.
Also posted in Counting Other Things, Shakespeare
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The Ancestral Text
In this post I want to understand the consequences of “massive addressability” for “philosophies of access”–philosophies which assert that all beings exist only as correlates of our own consciousness. The term “philosophy of access” is used by members of the Speculative Realist school: it seems to have been coined largely as a means of rejecting everything […]
Text: A Massively Addressable Object
At the Working Group for Digital Inquiry at Wisconsin, we’ve just begun our first experiment with a new order of magnitude of texts. Hope and I started working with 36 items about 6 years ago when we began to study Shakespeare’s First Folio plays. Last year we expanded to 320 items with the help of […]