It’s hard to conceive of distance measured in anything other than a straight line. The biplot below, for example, shows the scores of Shakespeare’s plays on the two Docuscope LATs discussed in the previous post, FirstPerson and AbstractConcepts: Plotting the items in two dimensions gives the viewer some general sense of the shape of the data. “There are more items […]
Author Archives: Michael Witmore
Finding “Distances” Between Shakespeare’s Plays 2: Projecting Distances onto New Bases with PCA
Posted in Quant Theory, Shakespeare
Tagged change of basis, Hans Blumenberg, humanities, Jonathon Shlens, literary concepts, pca, Principal Component Analysis, projection
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Finding “Distances” Between Shakespeare’s Plays 1
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 […]
Posted in Shakespeare, Visualizing English Print (VEP)
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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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