We have thought a lot about what a “text” is in literary studies over the last few decades, spurred on by editorial theory, deconstruction, new media studies and book history. A nominalist by inclination, I tend to think of a text (real or digitized) as a provisional state of something, this other something being a […]
Category Archives: Quant Theory
Penalty Kicks and Distributed Movement
Gabriel Dias, graduate student at RPI, has recently modeled the way in which penalty kickers move their bodies as they prepare for a shoot. His findings suggest that there are several “tells” – for example, the angle of the hips, or the position of the planted foot – which predict the ultimate direction of the […]
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Tagged behavior, distributed activity, genre, parallelism, Spinoza
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Texts as Objects II: Object Oriented Philosophy. And Criticism?
In the previous post I laid out several questions about the nature of texts, objects and interpretation that arise when we subject texts — for example, the Folio plays of Shakespeare — to statistical analysis. Above is a sketch of two texts, T1 and T2 (forgive the hand-drawn visuals), that exist as documents we might […]
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Texts as Objects I: Object Oriented Philosophy. And Criticism?
In the work I have been doing on Shakespeare with my colleague Jonathan Hope (see previous posts under Shakespeare category), we have approached the plays as two kinds of objects simultaneously: as historical documents of theater history and as objects of statistical analysis. We have emphasized their theatrical foundations because we believe this is the […]
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Spectralism, Maya Lin Show at Corcoran
Two items worth mentioning: today I had a chance to hear the new record from the Steve Lehman Quartet called Travail, Transformation and Flow, which shows off some of what is new in spectralism, an aesthetic that involves analyzing a tone from a single instrument with a computer and developing improvisations out of its overtone […]