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.