Gross National Happiness

Researchers have begun using Facebook as a social dataset for some very interesting research, including the recently released Gross National Happiness Index. The metric tracks aggregate "happiness" (based on the use of words like "happy," "joy," "awesome," etc) on a daily basis.

This is exciting news for me for two reasons. First, it means there are other people out there using these commercial websites to produce real research. It's validating to see others agree that online mega-sites are turning into social resources in their own right, spaces diverse and vast enough to support (more or less) general population research. Second, it's led me to LIWC, an intriguing piece of software for measuring different kinds of aggregate themes in texts--positive and negative emotions, for example. There are a number of similar efforts out there, but this one does seem to be fairly comprehensive, and it's been put to impressive use on the Facebook project. I'm thinking about how to analyze professional and consumer book reviews in more sophisticated ways and this route has some strong appeal.

Author Soundtrack

I feel like the soundtrack has changed recently around here from the mellow tunes of summer so something more purposeful, something with an actual beat. This is good news for the dissertation project, which has taken on steam again after a summer of revising, paper-pushing and sustained attention to the vodka-sequestering properties of watermelon lemonade.

With soundtracks in mind I was delighted to come across a reference on the Pynchon-L mailing list, wherein I occasionally lurk, to this. Music plays a big role in Pynchon's work, and he took the delightful step of writing up a playlist to go along with his new novel, Inherent Vice. The list mingles real 1960s artists with a few of his own creations, like Carmine and the Cal-Zones.

Tripping down the shuffle soon, I hope: A return to Infinite Jest and Infinite Summer; some pithy definitions of postmodernism (not mine); and an update on networks both allusive and recommendational.

Genre Fiction & The Relentless Undead

One of the interesting questions at play in my dissertation is the way treat genre writers differently from "real" writers. Authors like Michael Chabon, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy straddle the boundaries between "literary" fiction and different genre styles in interesting ways. There's a great article in this weeks Sunday Times Magazine discussing Jack Vance, an apparently seminal genre writer whom I never read in all my years as a genre bookworm. According to the article Vance (and many other genre writers, I think) approached fiction as a job and a career as much as an art form. Vance and his wife would travel to exotic places, find a cheap hotel, and draft a new novel together. Nice life! That kind of commercial focus is much less acceptable among "serious" novelists.

While we're on the subject, I will now publicly admit that I recently read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, probably the most violent fictional assault to date on the barriers dividing highbrow and pulp. My wife quite accurately calls it an "abomination." I think she's serious, but when I repeat it, I mean it in a good way. I would like to share my favorite paragraph here. See if you can tell what was changed from the original Austen:

But why Mr. Darcy came so often to the Parsonage, it was more difficult to understand. It could not be for society, as he frequently sat there ten minutes together without opening his lips; and when he did speak, it seemed the effect of necessity rather than of choice. He seldom appeared really animated, even at the sight of Mrs. Collins gnawing upon her own hand. What remained of Charlotte would liked to have believed this change the effect of love, and the object of that love her friend Eliza. She watched him whenever they were at Rosings, and whenever he came to Hunsford; but without much success, for her thoughts often wandered to other subjects, such as the warm, succulent sensation of biting into a fresh brain. Mr. Darcy certainly looked at her friend a great deal, but the expression of that look was disputable. It was an earnest, steadfast gaze, but she often doubted whether there were much admiration in it, and sometimes it seemed nothing but absence of mind. And upon imagining Mr. Darcy's mind, her thoughts would again turn to the subject of chewing on his salty, cauliflower-like brain.

A Very Finite Summer

Since I'm working on the changing nature of reading and on contemporary American literature, it seemed almost obligatory for me to check out Infinite Summer, a massive blog-based reading group organized around David Foster Wallace's massive Infinite Jest. The reading group's pace is quite reasonable by grad student standards--75 pages a week--but in the true spirit of studentdom I started weeks late and have been struggling to catch up.

That means I haven't yet really delved into the culture of the online exchange, but I am curious to see how things are going over there. From my brief perusal of the site so far, it seems the basic structure is for a few authors to post on their reading experiences, and the rest of the community is left to hang out in the comments. This works well for your average blog, but it seems a little limiting for a book discussion group, which would really work better with a forum architecture. Maybe there is one and I haven't found it yet?

The site's structure does seem to emulate the deceptive orderliness of Infinite Jest, with its footnotes and acronyms.* There are guides and summaries and a schedule, but I find the site disorienting as a whole, as a place to talk about the book, much as Infinite Jest ends up being disorienting. Readers quickly realize that the acronyms are explained inconsistently, at random, in medias res; that they're thrown in and out of numerous plot-lines like hapless tennis balls; that the end notes and gestures toward structure are deeply satirical and philosophically agnostic about the whole idea of knowledge. Hence, on the site: the conversation goes on through a Twitter tag, comments, Tumblr, Facebook...and I just found the forum. They do have one after all.

I guess this isn't a bad way to honor Wallace's passing, but is it a good way to talk about his book? Obviously I'm thinking of a different kind of conversation, one where people lean forward around a table and interrupt each other, whereas Infinite Summer is a beast that can only exist online: an imaginary space full of people zooming in and out, talking about the book or not, employing various means of intellectual transportation.

I love the idea of this online reading group, so my question isn't meant to be hostile, merely inquisitive. I'll report back when I've learned more (and, say, actually read more than a handful of posts from the various zones of Infinite Summer).



* Acronyms, while cryptic, always imply a bedrock of rational thought, convention and informational structure, however ludicrous that implication might be.

Book Seer

I can't decide whether to be excited or annoyed that somebody else has come up with the same idea I've been playing around with for several months now in my dissertation research. Well, the beauty of the web is that they can slap a quick implementation up overnight, whereas it's going to be months if not years before I really get my work out into the open. Where my six professional readers can really delve into it.

So while we're waiting for that glorious day, we can play around with Book Seer, a recommendation site that asks you for a book and then scrapes Amazon and LibraryThing to suggest further reading for you. Neat!

My Pynchon Industry

I just finished delivering my talk at Digital Humanities 2009, and I think it went pretty well. I've gotten a couple of requests for my slides, so here they are.

If you would be interested in playing with the (somewhat badly behaved) Java visualization I showed at the end of my talk, please email me.

I would love your feedback on this project! Thanks.

I have arrived

It's been quite a while since I updated this blog, so here's a rapid review.

I've completed a draft for my dissertation chapter on Thomas Pynchon.

I've got a messy first half of an introductory chapter too, but I'm trying hard not to think about just how much revision that's going to need.

All of this has snapped into close focus with the end of the academic year and my presence this week at the University of Maryland for Digital Humanities Conference 2009. After months of solitude interrupted mainly (if regularly) by the dogs, I find myself surrounded by people thinking about the same questions I've been wrestling with. Cool!

I'll be presenting on Thursday and panel-hopping for the rest of the time. I'm also looking forward to meeting and re-meeting luminaries of my Twitter and podcast world.

More Culture Maps

The images linked below are two more examples of the material I'm generating for my dissertation. The first is a visualization of the authors and literary references (in proper noun form) made by New York Times reviewers of Pynchon's books. The second image is the same, only drawn from Amazon customer reviews of Pynchon's books. Comparing the two, you can see how different sorts of cultural reference (and different levels of density of reference) exist in the sets of text.

Both images were created using the wonderful web gizmo Wordle, which allows users to upload their own data and create custom visualizations.

The New Open Culture

My good friend Dan Colman has recently moved his great site Open Culture to its new Internet home, the one it should have had all along: www.openculture.com. I wrote a few blog posts for Dan back in the day (far fewer than I'd actually said I would, alas), and I love the site.

If you've never seen it, be sure to check it out, especially his incredible, expanding archive of free high-quality podcasts, lectures and more--including a great list of free audio books.

Culture Map #1

I'm trying to work out different ways of mapping out the networks of books, ideas and writers that build up around different novels over time--a concept I'm calling ideational networks. The web is fostering a lot of these networks (think Web 2.0) and at the same time preserving them, allowing me to map some of the connections.

One of the things I've been looking at is the ecology of book recommendations and reviews on sites like Amazon and LibraryThing. Below is a map of the book recommendations branching out from LibraryThing, which we can assume is driven largely by the book choices that users of the site have made over time.

As you can see from the image below, the network is fairly diffuse, but with some interesting connection points. Nabokov's work, particularly Pnin, seems like a major intersection between different cultural sub-networks. I'll have more to say about this and other maps as I continue working, but for now I thought this might be a cool image to share. If anyone's interested I'll share some of the technical details in a future post.

Reading : Material Culture :: Chicken : Egg

A few weeks ago Matthew Wilkens posed a question reaching to the heart of my interdisciplinary project:

A question I'm sure you've already gotten many times and likely will many more in the future: To what extent is this kind of work meaningfully understood under the rubric "literary criticism" at all, as opposed to literary-themed sociology and/or the business of literature? ... [I]t seems to me that the line between the English department and the sociology department or the business school probably falls somewhere around whether you want to explain the features of particular texts by reference to social/cultural/economic factors, or explain socioeconomic effects by way of book-related networks. So ... which is it?

As I replied then, the answer is a bit of both, but I think I ought to expand on that a little more. I am particularly interested in literature as a social phenomenon, and not just an individual experience. Reading can have extremely powerful transformative effects on the individual, of course, and those changes can impact whole categories of interaction and cultural thought. I believe that the authors who have been most successful both commercially and critically are particularly gifted at recasting the operations of our reading minds. Not only does reading Pynchon or Morrison enlighten, entertain and at times frustrate, it also changes how we think about fundamental planks in the social structures holding us together, like ideas of race or communication.

That said, I hasten to add that I don't think of this project as an economic story or a business school case study. I don't think these authors set out to get rich and decided that writing novels was the way to do it. Nor do I believe that they are motivated by a quest for recognition or a conscious desire to change how people think, though I do think those motivations are intrinsic to almost all of us to some degree.

Instead, I think of this as a literary approach to the question of reading. If the humanities must show their worth, there is no better way to do it than to reveal the structures of connection and thought that define us as cultural beings, to show how those structures are changing, and to consider the many and expanding ways in which we read and write the cultural landscape. Contemporary literature is an exciting, complicated field to work on, and it takes an interdisciplinary approach to map out the connections between different kinds of cultural authority, changing modes of readership/criticism/authorship and the abiding power of literature to convey human experience at a deeper level than any other medium.

In short, I don't think there's a one-directional causal force at work here. These ideational networks of texts, ideas and people are messy, provisional things that generally influence us in subtle, if pervasive, ways. I'll be doing some close reading, and also trying to think about how others do their close reading, and how we read and evaluate culture collectively.

April Fool's

I find this update from UPS grimly entertaining:

Your package is on time with a scheduled delivery date of 04/01/2009.

In Transit - On Time
Scheduled Delivery: 04/01/2009
Shipped To: PHOENIX, AZ, US
Shipped/Billed On: 03/29/2009
Service: GROUND
Weight: 3.00 Lbs

Package Progress

04/01/2009 15:00:00 UNLOAD SCAN[I] PORTLAND, OR, US
04/01/2009 11:05:00 ARRIVAL SCAN[I] PORTLAND, OR, US
03/30/2009 22:14:00 DEPARTURE SCAN[I] BALDWIN PARK, CA, US
03/29/2009 17:22:00 ORIGIN SCAN[I] BALDWIN PARK, CA, US

Talking Pynchon at the Digital Humanities Conference

I'm excited to report that my paper on Pynchon was accepted for the annual Digital Humanities Conference in June. It's provisionally titled "Cultural Capital in the Digital Era: Mapping the Success of Thomas Pynchon" and will be a first run at the Pynchon chapter of my dissertation.

I'm trying to pull together research for the paper now and am hoping to focus on creating some "cultural network" maps of books that have been brought into association in various ways. For instance, professional book critics invariably describe new books in comparison to established ones so readers can get a sort of triangulated idea of what the new thing is like. Sites like Amazon and LibraryThing are much more explicit in the connections they draw, though of course the mathematical models they employ seem even murkier than the brain's associative engines. So my first objective is to pull together some maps of the books that cluster around Pynchon in these respectively critical, commercial and webby venues.

I'll post more about these ideas (and hopefully some web-based models for people to play with) once I know more. I've spent the past week reigniting the long-dormant Perl modules in my head. Next step: visualizing the data.

Mapping Literature: Cultural Capital in the Digital Era

I've been making a lot of progress since I last posted here and I think ti's time for a more complete description of my dissertation project (yes, be still your racing hearts). Here's the overview:

In the past fifty years the world of literary publication has experienced a continual revolution of new social structures, business models and textual media. The growth of university writing programs, the birth of the mass-market paperback, the corporate consolidation of publishing houses, the emergence of national mega-bookstores, and the dominance of the Internet are some of the major milestones in this saga. Yet by and large literary critics still approach books published today with the same set of cultural and scholarly expectations as they do works that appeared a century ago. The goal of this dissertation is two-fold: first, to map out these new and still-evolving ecologies of reading and writing in a digital era; second, to articulate a new model for the engines and pathways of literary success in its many contemporary forms.

The structure of the dissertation will address these two goals simultaneously by working through a series of specific examples of contemporary literary success using a case-study model. The relationships between new literary ecologies and authorial success are related in complex and interdependent ways, and the use of diverse case studies will allow us to employ information from a variety of different sources, including literary close readings, analyses of critical responses, and a variety of non-literary sources, such as consumer reviews, citation indexes, sales information, interviews, etc. Many of these evidentiary sources offer a glimpse into parts of our lives as readers that were rarely accessible in the past: book associations (i.e. the “customers who bought this book also bought these other books” feature), customer ratings, reviews, and conversations, and used book availability (as a comparative index of a work’s staying power), for example. It is also important to recognize the roles that many actors play in the process, from literary agents to publicity managers and from booksellers to professional critics. I will also conduct interviews with representatives from these groups in order to map out their varying positions in terms of cultural production. Each case study will face the challenge of integrating disparate empirical evidence with textual readings.

The value of this project lies in the attempt to shift the playing field of literary studies, however incrementally, to adapt to a changing media reality. As the impact of capitalism on cultural life and the world of the university becomes ever more powerful, any honest study of contemporary literature must address the ways in which cultural values and economic interests interact to help determine what, how, and why we read. This project will uncover some of the ways in which these changes affect not just the production of literature but its life after publication. The authors profiled here have all succeeded (or failed interestingly) in creating ideational networks with their books, leading readers to other books and to new ideas, dialogs, and writings of their own. As more readers become critics and writers, the traditional boundaries of publishing are crumbling.1 I will argue for a new understanding of literary fame and the role of authorship in an increasingly collaborative, engaged society, where capitalist consumption increasingly equals cultural production. In this landscape the critical term cultural capital must be overhauled to incorporate the role of ideational networks and the distributed power of millions of cultural producers/consumers. The growing sophistication of cultural production is leading to new scarcities and abundances driven by the resources and capacities of this cultural consumer, a figure now actively engaged in the construction and expansion of ideational networks and in redefining literary production.

Reading on the Rise

The National Endowment for the Arts has announced a reversal in the decades-long downward trend of American reading habits. The last time they published a major study on reading the hue and cry was great and unabating. Naturally I'd like to attribute this to the grand textual revitalization that the Internet (broadly speaking) has brought about. The dominance of television ended sometime in the late 1990s, a fact we can be sure about because it experienced its golden age just as the empire was crumbling.

Now we've got billions of screens--yes, of course, video hasn't gone away, but we're also doing much, much more reading and even some writing. The blog explosion minted millions of new authors, and whether they stuck with it or not, they all got to experience the thrill of publication in some way. The enduring power of the keyboard in mobile devices and email in all sorts of places is a testament to the fact that we are once again word people. I have no evidence to connect this with the fact that more people are reading fiction (assuming that it's even true, that this isn't a statistical blip). But I'd like to think our enhanced communication landscape is retraining us to appreciate the pleasures of literature.

Finding the Poetry in the Desert of the Real

You've got to love that Slavoj Žižek. I developed a fondness for his inspired/crazed lacanian readings of popular culture when I put together a course on the Matrix trilogy a couple of summers ago. So I think the author of Welcome to the Desert of the Real might have some interesting things to say about the clip below. Fortunately it's my blog so I'm going to say some interesting things instead. But go ahead and watch it first.



What I love about this is the way the creator finds poetry in the many wasted moments of our blasted media landscape. I mean no insult to Charlie Rose, but I love the way the quirks, gaps and nuances that usually speed by too quickly for thought are captured here like fireflies in a jar. The shaggy, lurching bizarreness that makes us human lurks behind even the most poised and professional mask, and I think this clip helps bring it out.

Thanks to friend Dan at Open Culture for posting this!

Pynchon and the Paranoid Sublime

It seems like the holidays happened ages ago, but it's only been two weeks since we entered 2009 and a little less than that since I got back on the dissertation trail. I spent most of my time since the last posting working on a revised dissertation proposal. Once I ascertain that my committee has, in fact, approved that, I'll post some details here.

The other project I've been working on and just completed is a revised draft of a paper on Pynchon and cultural capital in the digital era. I'm arguing that Pynchon's unique success as an author is connected to both his postmodern anonymity and something I'm calling the paranoid sublime. This combination has helped make Pynchon such a critical and commercial success, allowing me to use his career as a model for exploring the new cultural capital. I'm hoping to submit it for publication soon.

The Pynchon paper will eventually turn into one of my chapters, so I'm hoping to work through some of my ideas in this shorter form first.