Both images were created using the wonderful web gizmo Wordle, which allows users to upload their own data and create custom visualizations.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
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.
Both images were created using the wonderful web gizmo Wordle, which allows users to upload their own data and create custom visualizations.
Monday, April 20, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Reading : Material Culture :: Chicken : Egg
A few weeks ago Matthew Wilkens posed a question reaching to the heart of my interdisciplinary project:
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
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
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
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