Last night I was thinking about Douglas Adams' bathtub and I realized I should post about the few touristy things I had time to do while I was in London.
-I visited the National Portrait Gallery and said hello to the Romantic poets, who first induced me to really enjoy studying English. NB: air-conditioned!
-I went on a bat walk. This was exciting for a number of reasons, not least of which was meeting my fellow Batwalkers (distant cousins of the Skywalkers). Also, they hand out bat detectors and keep some sample bats on hand for demonstration purposes. Finally, you get to walk through British parks at night, which is apparently a huge subversive thrill. But the highlight is the audio from the bat detectors, which lend a whole new dimension to the experience.
-I had lunch with my friend Scott at Google's London offices. The major highlight for me was to brush a hand over Douglas Adams' bathtub, which now resides among a forest of deck chairs. Baths are, needless to say, very important in the Hitchhiker's Guide mythos. This one looked sleek and self-satisfied, as if it quietly devoured an AdSense salesperson once every week or two.
-I saw Keats House, the cottage where he fell in love with Fanny Brawne, moved from persistently to gravely ill, and wrote some fine poetry. They've even got the (replacement) tree under which he composed Ode to a Nightingale, a poem that presages the entirety of Yeats in eighty lines.
All in all, a great trip!
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Back to work
I returned from London on Monday and have been slowly gearing back up into work mode. DH2010 was a great conference experience and I met a lot of people I'm hoping to keep in touch with. I think my talk went pretty well and it seems like more people are doing work similar to mine this year, which is comforting.
And, since Digital Humanities is such an impressively techie and well-organized affair, they've already got an audio interview that I did right after my talk posted online. I understand that more materials from the conference will be posted on arts-humanities.net in the days to come; it would be great if they post slides from presentations that I missed. It will have to console us until next year's conference...at Stanford!
And, since Digital Humanities is such an impressively techie and well-organized affair, they've already got an audio interview that I did right after my talk posted online. I understand that more materials from the conference will be posted on arts-humanities.net in the days to come; it would be great if they post slides from presentations that I missed. It will have to console us until next year's conference...at Stanford!
Thursday, July 8, 2010
London Dispatch
I've once again fallen way behind in my blogging, but fortunately I have much to report. I'm writing from Digital Humanities 2010, where I'll be presenting my latest research on Saturday. The conference is in London and it's been exciting and a little befuddling to wrestle jet-lag amidst an exciting array of panels and posters.
The paper I'm giving is on Toni Morrison, the subject of the recently completed Chapter 2. It's in its fourth iteration now, after a trial run among the friendly brains at Stanford and great panels at ASU's Southwest English Grad Students conference and ACLA. At each point I've been refining my methodologies and slides (lesson one: visualization is endlessly finicky).
As before, this is a case study where Morrison's work is really a jumping-off point for an exploration of her reading publics and the nature of literary fame. When I presented at DH2009, I was still working out how to approach these questions and adopted a kind of shotgun strategy, using every data set and methodology I could think of to see what worked. That paper, on Thomas Pynchon, had a lot going on: networks of Amazon recommendations; Wordle images based on word counts of book reviews; bar graphs of library copies; graphs of MLA citations and comparisons of MLA, Amazon and newsgroup publications by year.
Most of these ideas were interesting, but only some of them 'stuck' for me. The cyclical nature of academic and other kinds of publication, for example, was revealing to see but a point that probably only needs to be proven once. This year I've decided to focus on the richest results from the past and push the envelope. My paper will look at the social lives of Morrison's novels, and the 'social' networks they inhabit online. I've worked hard in the past year to create collocation-based networks and to use network analysis to identify the most significant nodes and clusters in Morrison's ideational networks online. These are the most interesting, and the messiest, of my datasets, and network analysis has revealed some surprising patterns that I'll be sharing on Saturday.
So that's the major news. I have a couple of other projects cooking that I'm going to write up when I have some solid bulletins to report.
The paper I'm giving is on Toni Morrison, the subject of the recently completed Chapter 2. It's in its fourth iteration now, after a trial run among the friendly brains at Stanford and great panels at ASU's Southwest English Grad Students conference and ACLA. At each point I've been refining my methodologies and slides (lesson one: visualization is endlessly finicky).
As before, this is a case study where Morrison's work is really a jumping-off point for an exploration of her reading publics and the nature of literary fame. When I presented at DH2009, I was still working out how to approach these questions and adopted a kind of shotgun strategy, using every data set and methodology I could think of to see what worked. That paper, on Thomas Pynchon, had a lot going on: networks of Amazon recommendations; Wordle images based on word counts of book reviews; bar graphs of library copies; graphs of MLA citations and comparisons of MLA, Amazon and newsgroup publications by year.
Most of these ideas were interesting, but only some of them 'stuck' for me. The cyclical nature of academic and other kinds of publication, for example, was revealing to see but a point that probably only needs to be proven once. This year I've decided to focus on the richest results from the past and push the envelope. My paper will look at the social lives of Morrison's novels, and the 'social' networks they inhabit online. I've worked hard in the past year to create collocation-based networks and to use network analysis to identify the most significant nodes and clusters in Morrison's ideational networks online. These are the most interesting, and the messiest, of my datasets, and network analysis has revealed some surprising patterns that I'll be sharing on Saturday.
So that's the major news. I have a couple of other projects cooking that I'm going to write up when I have some solid bulletins to report.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Farewell, Leland
Blogger is ending its support for FTP publishing of blog files. That means that my blog can no longer be hosted on Stanford's servers in its current form. Ergo, we're back here. Assuming this works. Further bulletins as events warrant.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Talking in Tempe
I had a great time speaking at the Southwest English Graduate Student Symposium on Saturday, or SWEGS, according to its intimidating acronym. This was a great way to introduce some of my research on chapter 2 of the dissertation, which is a case study on Toni Morrison's ouvre. It was great to meet some other members of the local English grad student community, and I was shocked (and pleased) to encounter a fellow panelist who's also looking at Amazon's recommendation networks, and I'm looking forward to sharing ideas with him down the road.
This was the first stop in the 2010 road tour, which will include Stanford, New Orleans and, hopefully, London. I'll be updating the presentation with new bells and whistles as I make more progress on some new ways of looking at references in book reviews.
Until then, back to the mines.
This was the first stop in the 2010 road tour, which will include Stanford, New Orleans and, hopefully, London. I'll be updating the presentation with new bells and whistles as I make more progress on some new ways of looking at references in book reviews.
Until then, back to the mines.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
A Big Year
2010! Where is my jetpack?
It's been a busy year so far, and I'm hoping to keep up with this new, futuristic energy. After a bit of a slow autumn (we use the term metaphorically here in Phoenix) and the usual distraction of the holidays, I finally got to check a few major items off my list this week. Yesterday I completed a funding application for the Stanford Humanities Center--they offer a few dissertation fellowships each year. Today I finally--FINALLY--finished revising a paper submission based on my Pynchon chapter and sent it back for round two.
Now it's time to buckle down and return to data analysis. I've assembled a great pile of book reviews and recommendations in a MySQL database, and I have a few discrete challenges ahead of me:
First, I need to come up with an effective way to identify and then tag proper nouns in book reviews. This is easy to do badly and then clean up by hand, which is what I did for the last chapter. But there are a lot of Morrison reviews out there, so now I really need a computer for this. As a first pass/proof of concept I'm hand-editing a little "dictionary" of all the proper noun literary references made in professional reviews of Morrison's work. Then I'll write some kind of program to search for and tag those references in the reviews.
Once I get that figured out, the second trial process is going to be creating network graphs of these literary references based on collocations. I think I'll probably start by defining links as "in the same paragraph," but this might change depending on how useful the graphs end up being.
If I can get all this working in the next week or two, hopefully I will get some kind of epiphany for how to do automate the process elegantly for a much larger, and badly proof-read, set of consumer reviews of Morrison. It's 2010...where is my artificial intelligence research assistant?
It's been a busy year so far, and I'm hoping to keep up with this new, futuristic energy. After a bit of a slow autumn (we use the term metaphorically here in Phoenix) and the usual distraction of the holidays, I finally got to check a few major items off my list this week. Yesterday I completed a funding application for the Stanford Humanities Center--they offer a few dissertation fellowships each year. Today I finally--FINALLY--finished revising a paper submission based on my Pynchon chapter and sent it back for round two.
Now it's time to buckle down and return to data analysis. I've assembled a great pile of book reviews and recommendations in a MySQL database, and I have a few discrete challenges ahead of me:
First, I need to come up with an effective way to identify and then tag proper nouns in book reviews. This is easy to do badly and then clean up by hand, which is what I did for the last chapter. But there are a lot of Morrison reviews out there, so now I really need a computer for this. As a first pass/proof of concept I'm hand-editing a little "dictionary" of all the proper noun literary references made in professional reviews of Morrison's work. Then I'll write some kind of program to search for and tag those references in the reviews.
Once I get that figured out, the second trial process is going to be creating network graphs of these literary references based on collocations. I think I'll probably start by defining links as "in the same paragraph," but this might change depending on how useful the graphs end up being.
If I can get all this working in the next week or two, hopefully I will get some kind of epiphany for how to do automate the process elegantly for a much larger, and badly proof-read, set of consumer reviews of Morrison. It's 2010...where is my artificial intelligence research assistant?
Monday, October 12, 2009
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.
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.
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