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
Thursday, March 5, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
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.
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.
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