Science Fiction as the Conscience of Science

My review of Ridley Scott's Prophets of Science Fiction ran on Slate's Future Tense channel today! Here's a teaser:

Science fiction’s reputation for appealing to the nerdy and anti-social has long suggested that it has more to do with escapism than the real world.

Yet as Ridley Scott’s new Discovery Science show, Prophets of Science Fiction, chronicles, the genre deserves to be taken seriously for its ability to tease out the ethical and moral issues that accompany technological progress. Upon first hearing about Prophets, I expected the director of Alien and Blade Runner to get completely lost in space while discussing Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, and Philip K. Dick and how their work “foreshadowed” current technologies. Despite the name (we’ll get to that later), I am happy to report that Scott delivered this concept just as efficiently as he delivered that alien baby to the screen: The show successfully brings science fiction and fact into conversation with one another. 

Nerd Discourse and the Digital Humanities

In my talk at Emory yesterday I discussed nerds: the literary nerds David Foster Wallace and Junot Díaz, but also the ways in which their particular nerdish styles might tell us something about style and the digital humanities. Natalia Cecire wrote up a fantastic blog post fleshing these ideas out more fully and I think we're on to something really interesting here. Here's one really good bit, but I suggest you read the whole thing:

The term "nerdy," of course, was ripe for questioning. As Ed had remarked in passing (and doubtless explores more deeply elsewhere), Wallace's and Díaz's respective nerdy networks were overwhelmingly male. And there's a way in which DH's identification with "nerdiness" taps very much into the version of nerd identity—seen also, if differently, in both Wallace and Díaz's nerdinesses—that manifests as wounded (and defensive) masculinity. I argued in a previous post that the defensive posture at times characterizes discussions of DH, which occasionally even seems to borrow the language of struggle and resistance traditionally used by queer activists, activists of color, disability rights activists, feminists, etc., even while, in many institutional settings, magically turning out to be disproportionately white and male.

 As I'm about to post on Natalia's blog, I think there's more fuel to add to the fire here: the question of "serious" literature and gender bias in reviewing and criticism, a question I've tackled before.

Emory DiSCourses

I am very pleased to be the first speaker at Emory's new Digital Scholarship Commons. I've already had a great time meeting the DiSC crew and I'm really looking forward to the talk tomorrow.

For anyone there who'd like to follow along on their own machine, here's the presentation I'll be running through (also embedded below):

American Networks, American Nerds on Prezi

Multitasking

It's been a busy month around here. I spent a fantastic week visiting the New America Foundation in DC and getting to know the people behind ASU's Future Tense partnership with NAF and Slate Magazine. There has been a lot of action back at the office too, and I'll be posting shortly about my upcoming trip to Emory. But for now I wanted to mention that I wrote up a short post for Open Culture last week to promote another ASU project, the very cool 10,000 Solutions. Check it out and share your bright idea!

American Networks, American Nerds

I'm very pleased to announce that I've been invited to speak at Emory University's new Digital Scholarship Commons next week. If you find yourself in the vicinity you won't want to miss it. Here are the details:

The Digital Scholarship Commons Presents Ed Finn, Ph.D.: "American Networks, American Nerds"
Wednesday, November 2, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Research Commons, third Floor, Robert W. Woodruff Library

Ed Finn, a recent Stanford graduate and University Innovation Fellow at Arizona State University, will speak about his network analysis of Amazon consumer reviews of David Foster Wallace and Junot Díaz, explaining how these differ from literary critics' assessments. You can read about Dr. Finn's work in the New York Times.
 
This talk explores changing systems of literary reputation in contemporary American fiction through two case studies: Junot Díaz and David Foster Wallace. Long-established models of literary production are changing dramatically as the digital era continues to blur the divisions between authors, critics and readers. Millions of cultural consumers are now empowered to participate in previously closed literary conversations and to express forms of mass distinction through their purchases and reviews of books. The bookselling behemoth Amazon has been collecting such information from its users since 1996, assembling a rich ecology of cultural data. Drawing on Amazon’s archive and a set of professional book reviews, I analyze the literary networks that readers have created for Wallace and Díaz through their collective acts of distinction. Tracing contemporary shifts in critical and commercial reception, I argue that both writers use style as a way to reinvent authorship for a hyper-mediated age. By redrawing the boundaries of dialect and slang in American English, they promote radical revisions to contemporary concepts of literary identity and community.

ACL[x]

I'm very excited to be a part of ACL[x], an experimental conference under the aegis of the American Comparative Literature Association. I'll try to revise this post later, but for now I wanted to share a copy of my presentation for those who'd like to follow along on their own devices.

If the embedded version below fails you, try this link instead.

A Field Guide to Literary Networks on Prezi

My Hat's Off to Thinking Cap

I'm really delighted to announce that Patricia Cohen wrote up my recent essay on David Foster Wallace for her Thinking Cap column this week at The New York Times. Readers can download the full pdf of the essay here. A version of this research that I gave as a talk at Digital Humanities 2011 also got a nod from William Pannapacker in The Chronicle of Higher Education over the summer. I'm very grateful to these writers for covering my work as well as the editors, advisors and one extremely patient spouse who did so much to improve the final product.

Pamphlet #3

I'm very excited to announce that a version of my essay on David Foster Wallace has just been published online as the Stanford Literary Lab's third pamphlet. Here's the lead-in:

If there is one thing to be learned from David Foster Wallace, it is that cultural transmission is a tricky game. This was a problem Wallace confronted as a literary professional, a university-based writer during what Mark McGurl has called the Program Era. But it was also a philosophical issue he grappled with on a deep level as he struggled to combat his own loneliness through writing. To really study this question we need to look beyond the symbolic markets of prestige to the real market, the site of mass literary consumption, where authors succeed or fail based on their ability to speak to that most diverse and complicated of readerships: the general public. Unless we study what I call the social lives of books, we make the mistake of keeping literature in the same ascetic laboratory that Wallace tried to break out of with his intense authorial focus on popular culture, mass media, and everyday life.

First Post at Arcade

This morning my first post at Stanford's Arcade project went live. I responded to some interesting questions Lee Konstantinou posed about the contemporary novel. I'm really excited to join the Arcade fold and will make sure I cross-link to posts on my new blog there.

Literary Networks and Modern Magazines

There was an interesting discussion of the Stanford Literary Lab's second pamphlet, authored by Franco Moretti, over at a group academic blog called Magazine Modernisms. I decided to stick my oar in.

Wrestling the Gators of Adolescence

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed this novel, from its lush descriptions of the dystopian swamp amusement park industry to the mystical experience of journeying through the deep everglades. At Swamplandia! all the alligators are named Seth. It took me a little while to figure out where Russell was setting her course between absurdity and pathos, but once I did I really started enjoying the book. The descriptions of Kiwi Bigtree's employment at the World of Darkness, the Walmart of fun factories, were hilarious.



View all my reviews

Writing in the Real World

It's been a summer of major changes in my life: completing grad school and moving on to my first job as a fellow at Arizona State University. As I adjust to a new position where I am "doing" almost as much as I am "thinking" (for a very word-based, university definition of doing), the impossible has occurred. I've begun to miss the abundant time I used to spend just sitting at the keyboard, writing. And think about writing. And fiddling.

I still do a fair amount of sitting and fiddling in the new job, of course, but my full agenda there does not include any special time for research. There is no gilt-edged appointment in my office Outlook calendar. I need to make that time myself, and I've begun to wish I was a faster writer. I mean, I'm fast enough at drafting proposals, emails and memos, but I don't have the prodigious speed that some academics seem to have for polishing off whole essays in an evening. I can barely read whole essays in an evening.

So my ambitions for this year are to practice the arts of making time and of thinking through problems on the go. It's dawned on me that my new slate of responsibilities is not a temporary condition, and that the period of graduate navel-gazing is done forever.

The positive side of this new reality is that I am actually starting to enjoy working on my own stuff once again. It's still a challenge of will to revise dissertation work for publication, but I am really starting to look forward to some new projects and fresh directions. Who knows, maybe I'll even put more time into this blog?

Digital Humanities 2011

I'll revise this post later. For now, here are the slides for my presentation in PowerPoint:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5269957/Reading%2C%20Writing%20and%20Reputation.ppt

And a slightly modified PDF (without all the quote fly-ins):

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5269957/Reading%2C%20Writing%20and%20Reputation.pdf

----
I've finally returned to add to this post. I had a great time at Stanford's Digital Humanities 2011, and the conference once again impressed me: quality work and a truly collaborative atmosphere. I was lucky enough to be on a panel organized by Franco Moretti and starring Zephyr Frank and Rhiannon Lewis. I thought it was a huge success and I was thrilled to see it written up in the Chronicle.

This was my third year at Digital Humanities and for the first time I really felt like part of a community where I had friends to see and news to catch up on. The effect was of course magnified because I was returning to my "home" institution, which I hardly saw in the last three years of grad school after I moved to Phoenix. I really enjoyed hanging out with the Stanford DH crew at the banquet and I even got a photo credit. I'm grateful to Franco for the panel, Matt Jockers and Glen Worthey for organizing the whole shebang, and the English department for very generously supporting my trip after I was technically no longer a student there.

As for my talk, I think I'll let the slides and linked abstract speak for themselves. If someone is dying for the voice-over, let me know and I'll try to find some time. For now, onwards and upwards.

A Fresh Chapter

The funny thing about milestones in life is that they are not evenly spaced on the road. Rather they seem to appear in clusters, as they have for me over the past month or so.

The first milestone actually felt more like ten or twenty millstones that I hadn't noticed around my neck they were lifted off one by one. After much frantic writing, revising, formatting, proofreading and emailing, I completed and submitted my dissertation! As of now, I am a bona fide Doctor of Philosophy. If you are injured and require assistance, I will read you a poem. “The Social Lives of Books: Literary Networks in Contemporary American Fiction” is currently in processing but should be available from the Stanford libraries website soon.

Second, I am very pleased to announce that I will be joining Arizona State University as a University Innovation Fellow this July. This is an unusual position and I am very excited about the opportunity. My primary focus will be supporting and developing ASU’s New American University initiative, which is an effort to redefine public higher education for the twenty-first century. I'll be working in the Office of University Initiatives and I am looking forward to getting to know my new colleagues.

On Reading The Pale King

This was a strange experience for me, having recently spent a lot of time thinking about Wallace for a chapter of my dissertation. Somehow reading this unfinished novel brought the sad fact of his death to life unavoidably to mind in a way that my other DFW research never did.

The novel itself is really enjoyable--I could really see Wallace extending himself into the new style that he was struggling to develop. The various chapters are full of life and intelligence, and seemed in a sense less guarded and cerebral than his previous fiction. I found the whole setting of the novel (an IRS center in the 1980s) to be hilarious and was really drawn into the book in a way that this kind of postmodern fiction usually doesn't (though I love it anyway). That quality was particularly surprising because it doesn't really cohere as a novel and clearly was part of something larger that will never be.

At the end of the text, Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor, chose to include a collection of notes drawn from the author's working files on characters, potential plot twists and various endings for the book. (Unless, of course, this was also some kind of postmodern DFW gag, but it didn't read that way.) This closing chapter was what really brought Wallace's death home for me. I felt as if I'd been let in behind the curtain and seen the magician preparing his next trick, and he'd seen me see him, and there we both were, feeling upset and depressed and unable to think of a way to correct the situation. With most authors I would find this kind of glimpse into the voyaging writerly mind intriguing. In a different context I would probably enjoy this kind of thing with Wallace, too--I hope to check out his archives at the Ransom Center in Austin one day. But here, at the end of The Pale King, it just made me wish he'd been able to finish the book.

Nearing the Finish Line

I just sent off the last new chapter that I'll be writing for this dissertation to my committee. What remains is an introduction and a lot of revision, but it's very exciting to be approaching the end of a long, lonely road.

The chapter looks at two younger writers, David Foster Wallace and Junot Díaz, and argues that they both have carved out special positions for themselves through style. Each engages with the idea of the "nerd," which is a figure I've had trouble finding a lot of secondary literature on. There's some overlap with fans and media studies work on online communities, but the nerd is different, and it's a word Díaz in particular has used to describe himself and his work. What's interesting is that the two writers started with the same basic objection to the problems of what Wallace calls "Standard Written English" and came up with radically different solutions. Wallace pushed the envelope with footnotes and postmodern stylistic games; Díaz broke new ground in integrating English, Spanish, and many other cultural and genre dialects, making what he calls the bedrock fact of "unintelligibility" a central part of his fiction.

Day of Ed Finn

That is the rather hubristic automated title my temporary new blog was given by the Day of Digital Humanities folks. Maybe I should change that. In any case, come check it out! I'll be blogging all day about what exactly it is I do.

The Abiding Importance of Pie

Valentine's Day Massacre, originally uploaded by edfinn.

That is what happened to this pie soon after the photo was taken. It is a banana peanut butter cream pie with a chocolate cookie crust. And a little whipped cream on top. I MADE THIS PIE. For my wife. That's right.

I will accept your adulation now.

Papers, papers

In all the excitement of the holidays, MLA and then a trip to Egypt (!), I didn't have a chance to post about an exciting update from the publication front. Since then I also had some good conference news, so here's the skinny.

I'm really delighted to be participating in an awesome book project co-edited by Lee Konstantinou and Sam Cohen considering the impact of David Foster Wallace. The collection is under contract with Iowa and it got a great writeup in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Very exciting! I'm working on revisions to my chapter right now. My piece will explore how different groups of readers are defining Wallace's legacy through book reviews and literary consumption.

I had a paper accepted to Digital Humanities 2011! This may not seem like as big a deal until you start reading the comments on Twitter from people who didn't get in: the acceptance rate was only 31% for panel proposals. I've really enjoyed my previous two DH conferences, and I'm looking forward to presenting with fellow LitLabbers Zephyr Frank and Rhiannon Lewis, with Franco Moretti as moderator. The panel is titled "Networks, Literature, Culture" and it's going to be fantastic. I'll save you a seat.

Critical Code Studies

I've been traveling for the past two weeks, heading off immediately after the end of the MLA conference in early January. So I've largely missed out on the storm of Twitter and blogosphere discussion about an emerging critical discourse that I'm excited to be involved in: Critical Code Studies. Fortunately, the leaders of this new community have done an amazing job of generating wider awareness, building on a conference last summer and an ongoing collaboration with the electronic book review (which is where I come in) to several panels at MLA and a thriving new forum over at HASTAC. Most recently, the CCS folks have published the proceedings of the conference last summer in collaboration with Vectors.

I'm excited to dive into the HASTAC conversation and to start thinking about how CCS connects to my own work. A lot of the research I'm doing on the literary marketplace explores how new computational algorithms are changing cultural systems (i.e. the seasons of book production, which operate a little like Hollywood's summer blockbusters, winter Oscar-bait formula). But what I want to dwell on briefly here is how we are all learning to "read" algorithms ourselves on the front end. That's one of the basic sources of challenge in videogames, for instance. An example from my dissertation work might be the way we reverse-engineer recommendation systems (to figure out why something was suggested to us).

A still better example is Slate's Facebook parodies, which at their best adapt the functionality and rhetoric of the site's algorithms for political satire. For instance, in "100 Days of Barack Obama's Facebook news feed," the authors mimic Facebook's social media tracking for comedic effect:





Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2217225/

Here we have humans 'faking' algorithms for their own purposes, and I think the satire effectively skewers Facebook as well as politics. Ultimately, Slate's pieces work because they ask us if American politics is turning into a stylized, algorithmically deterministic system, a sadly unwitting self-parody. Or, as Aaron Sorkin put it, whether "socializing on the Internet is to socializing, what reality TV is to reality."

Of course, the CCS people would point out that there's no real code here, but I guess my point is that we're all involved in interpreting algorithms in various ways, whether or not we're coders. Perhaps my contribution to the HASTAC forum will be some of my own Perl code that I no longer understand!