The talk below was originally scheduled to be given as a lightning talk at DH2020. We have adapted it here for the new virtual conference. You can follow along with our slides here. For a discipline committed to rejecting reductionism,
Writing about Epidemic
This project started life as a “what to do while we’re all stuck inside” activity—starting a project on writing and disease seemed like it would be a useful way of channeling our restlessness into something productive. This isn’t a “coronavirus”
Star Texts: A Case Study in Harper’s and Vogue
In an early scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a casting agent warns the former star of a hit TV western against the kind of cameo roles he’s been taking since his show was canceled. Short
Lit Lab @ MLA2020
Attending MLA 2020 in Seattle? Mark your dance cards for these panels and roundtable featuring current Lit Lab researchers, alums, and affiliates. We hope to see you in Seattle! THURSDAY, 9 January Session #165: Digital Humanities and Nathaniel
Finding needles in 34 million haystacks
We are working on a new collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution about the histories of fame and celebrity in the United States. To ground ourselves in public discourse surrounding these topics, we began by analyzing ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers corpus. Working
Popularity/Prestige: A New Canon
Shortly after the Lab released my recent pamphlet on the structure of the literary canon, New York magazine ran an article about the 21st century canon, in which a panel of judges pick an early version of the literary canon
The Space of Poetic Meter
One of the goals of the Techne blog as a whole is to highlight technical issues in Digital Humanities—the kinds of in-the-weeds ideas that are interesting to specialists but don’t necessarily make the cut of a final paper. It’s easy
The (weird) distributions of function words across novels
Last week I looked at some of the clusters of words that fluctuate together across narrative time in the Lab’s corpus of ~27k American novels. A lot of these are pretty semantically “legible,” in the sense that it’s not hard
A hierarchical cluster of words across narrative time
I wanted to pick back up quickly with that list of the 500 most “non-uniform” words at the end of the last post about word distributions across narrative time in the American novel corpus. Before, I just put these into
Distributions of words across narrative time in 27,266 novels
Over the course of the last few months here at the Literary Lab, I’ve been working on a little project that looks at the distributions of individual words inside of novels, when averaged out across lots and lots of texts.