Recent content on Jonathan Goodwin
Contact Information 
 Jonathan Goodwin 
PO Box 43719 
Department of English 
University of Louisiana at Lafayette 
Lafayette, LA 70504 
joncgoodwin@gmail.com 
 Academic Employment 
 Associate Head, University of Louisiana at Lafayette: August 2025 . 
 Director of First Year Writing, University of Louisiana at Lafayette: August 2014 August 2025. 
 Professor…
This site , which uses hugo ( hyde theme), currently hosts my blog , which you can also browse by categories . 

 I also am on twitter .
Here are the courses I ve taught at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, East Carolina, Georgia Tech, and the University of Florida: 
 University of Louisiana at Lafayette 
 
 Fall 2025: Crime Fiction 
 Summer 2025: English Composition 
 Spring 2025: Composition Practicum 
 Fall 2024: Composition Practicum 
 Summer 2024: English Composition 
 Spring 2024:…
It has come to my attention that some instructions I posted about four years ago are in need of revision. I appreciate the attention given to this post by the authors, and I wouldn’t even want to notice that the dead link they identified was moved by the same organization that one of them works for, because what kind of precedent does that set? 
 In all seriousness, I am sure that the…
Like many netizens, I was amused by Andrej Karpahty’s “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks” when it first appeared. I don’t mean the explanation of what a recurrent neural network is or the claim that there’s much wisdom in Paul Graham’s essays. The text-generation samples, however, were really neat. RNN text-generators power many bots on…
I had not watched many Adam Curtis documentaries until the last week or so. I’m a bit impressionable, and I may have read a metafilter comment ten years ago that described him as more of a conspiracy theorist than he actually is. To make up for that deficit in understanding, I’ve watched many of the documentaries over the last week. His subjects align with my research interests in a…
Engaging Preliminaries 
 When I wrote my last post about modeling Darko Suvin’s genres of Victorian science fiction, I did not have access to Suvin’s comprehensive bibliography . What can I say? The Louisiana State Library loaned me theirs, but it took a few days. I was forced to model the texts that Suvin claimed were not science fiction. While I could guess what many of the books…
We are currently living in the era of John le Carré, if the attention given to the recent biography, memoir, and the television adaptation of his 1993 novel, The Night Manager , is any indication. I’m a long-time le Carré watcher . No adaptation will beat Thomas Alfredson’s film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as far as I’m concerned, especially not for capturing the weirdness of…
You can’t go far in reading about science fiction’s genres without encountering the work of Darko Suvin. His Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is among the most widely cited and influential works in the field. Suvin published a reference work devoted to Victorian SF after that: Victorian Science Fiction in the UK . Two related articles appeared in Science Fiction Studies in 1979 and…
The Object Lessons series, edited by Christopher Schaberg and Ian Bogost, comprises small, attractive books on everyday things like dust and silence. I suppose that such movements as “object-oriented philosophy,” “thing theory,” and “no ideas but in things” lurk somewhere in the motivating background. But it’s a pragmatic, exploratory series as far as I…
I admit to certain vices. I’ve been on the internet for a very long time. I read science fiction, and not just for my academic work. I was reading usenet in the early 90s, often using a VAX cluster. So many of the stupendous concepts of 2016, ranging from “meme magic” to transhumanism, I’ve seen develop in slow-motion: one shitpost at a time. Probably the purest…
Like many habitual internet users, I strongly believe that I have never bought anything advertised to me on the web, nor have any of these ads affected my behavior beyond momentary irritation. I sometimes take ad-blocking steps and am well aware of cookies, browser-entropy measures, and the wily IP address. My disdain for the so-called “Flash” plugin is complete. What, then, could a…
Michael Clune and I have several things in common: we’re about the same age (I’m a bit older), we’re both English professors, and we played many computer games during our youth, adolescence, graduate education, and perhaps even now. Gamelife: A Memoir is not so much about the games themselves but rather their formative effect on the author. Though I also spent many hours playing…
Kieran Healy posted last year about “sleeping beauties” in philosophy—papers that went several years before receiving any citations but that ended up accumulating many. This pattern is unusual, as most papers receive a good amount of citations immediately and continue to do so (or the opposite). I think literary studies and history is less paper-driven than philosophy, and I…
What Happens 
 Let me first attempt to explain the plot of Upstream Color , Shane Carruth’s second film. An entrepreneur has discovered that the worms who live in a certain orchid’s root matter have psychogenic properties. In particular, if ingested they induce a hypnotic state in which the subject is amenable to all suggestion. Teens are used for pharmacological testing, in…
About five years ago, I swore that I would finish Rhem 4 without hints. Though I haven’t been trying the whole time, I worked on it quite hard over the last week or so. I failed, yes. I’m going to take this opportunity to brag about what I solved without hints and complain about the two puzzles that I didn’t. 
 First, the complaining, as suits my nature. After finishing the…
Since I wrote my last set of directions for creating a topic-browser from the “Genre-specific wordcounts for 178,381 volumes from the HathiTrust Digital Library” , Andrew Goldstone updated his dfrtopics package to make it easier to use for this purpose. I haven’t completely rewritten the post, though where his instructions conflict with mine (using R instead of dropping into perl…
The “Word Frequencies in English-Language Literature, 1700-1922” data set from the HathiTrust digital library was released last month. (See Ted Underwood’s post for more detail.) It contains word-frequency lists of texts from the digitized HathiTrust collection published between 1700-1922 that are divided into fiction, poetry, and drama. (A description of the method used to…
Who doesn’t like an inferred apocalypse?* Maybe you remember the theory of The Sopranos ’s ending that proposed Tony, Carmela, children, onion rings, and Members Only all were evaporated by a nuclear bomb that Tony had inadvertently helped smuggle into the country. In Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Purity , there’s a seemingly absurd sub-plot involving a cartel attempting…
The Current Situation 
 Around last year at this time, I became interested in what the archived editions of the MLA Job Information List could tell us about how the profession has changed over time. The MLA provided page-scans of all the JILs going back to 1965, and Jim Ridolfo used commercial OCR software to make them searchable. Once the documents were searchable, finding the first…
There’s a line in R. A. Lafferty’s “The Primary Education of the Camiroi” about personality and politics: “Can you imagine a person so sick that he would actually desire to hold high office for any great period of time?” A familiar observation, I think, and one that came to mind as I was reading James Risen’s Pay Any Price . The Camiroi of Lafferty’s…
It takes me a while to get to the latest films nowadays. I thus missed
out on a lot of the excitement generated by Snowpiercer . The lively
premise is that an ever-running train circumnavigates a world frozen by
atmospheric particulates. These were dispersed into the sky to mitigate
global warming. Consequences were not anticipated, and apparently all
other life has become…
Inspired by (or directly ripping off, depending on how you want to
phrase it) Kieran
Healy’s 
post about migrating to Hugo , I have decided to do
the same. Like Healy, I was frustrated with the build times of
Octopress, and a somewhat inconvenient wine spill had made recovering my
Octopress installation a little bit more difficult than it was worth. 
 I have…
I realize this advice may only be relevant to a few souls in this
degraded world, but I wanted to document an issue I had when using the
org-mode LaTeX exporter with biblatex and James Clawson’s
 MLA style package. 
 My template automatically exports babel as one of the LaTeX
headers when exporting from org. If the default language is set as “en,”
the org…
“The Real Nature of Control” 
 The last text I assigned in my recent “Modernism, Fascism, and
Sexuality” seminar was Gravity’s
Rainbow . 1 Among its many oddities is a scene where the spirit of Walther Rathenau
is summoned through a medium for the entertainment and mockery of an
elite “corporate Nazi crowd”: 
 
 These signs are real. They are also the symptoms of a…
Two stories caught my attention yesterday. The
 first 
was a review of some recent studies of citation practices by field,
broadly considered. The claim that alarmed a number of people on twitter
was that “82%” of humanities scholarship was never cited. I pointed out
that it was a mistake to assume that “never cited” means “never…

I don’t remember exactly when the MLA digitized all of the issues of the
 Job Information List , but I
was excited about what these documents could tell us about institutional
history, the job market, salary trends, and many other things. The PDFs
hosted by MLA are image scans, however, which are not immediately
searchable as plain text. A variety of OCR solutions are…
Modernism/modernity is an important and relatively new journal
(1994-) that publishes interdisciplinary work in modernist studies.
Though I’ve never submitted an article to it (I did publish a
 book
review there), I’ve long heard that it is very difficult to publish
in. The last time I checked, the journal did not submit acceptance
statistics to the MLA…
A problem that many of the co-citation graphs I discussed in the last
post 
share is that they are too dense to be easily readable. I created the
sliders as a way of alleviating this problem, but some of the data sets
are too dense at any citation-threshold. Being able to view only one of
the communities at a time seemed like a plausible solution, but I was
far from sure…
I’ve created several new co-citation graphs recently. While I enjoy
looking at the visualizations, I haven’t yet analyzed any of them
thoroughly. The film
studies network was
intriguing to me for several reasons, and I’m going to explore it now in
more detail. 
 I downloaded just over 12K articles from various film studies journals
in Web of Science.…
I’ve written here and
 here 
about creating co-citation networks in D3 from Web of Science data. My
first experiment, described above, was creating a threshold slider. I
next wanted to try to create a chronological slider that would allow you
to adjust the dates of the citations in the network. 
 There are doubtless many ways of going about doing this, and…
Ted Underwood made the following
 comment on Scott
Weingart’s post about a recent
controversy with the Journal of Digital Humanities : 
 
 I can also imagine framing the issue, for instance, as a question
about the way power tends to be exercised in a one-to-many social
medium. I don’t know many academic fields that rely on Twitter as
heavily as DH does. It…
I wrote a 
 couple of Breaking Bad commentaries last
year after the end of the first part of the fifth season. There are now
only four episodes left, and I’m not entirely sure if we’ll see anything
else about Gustavo Fring’s past. I can see how the Lydia-plot could have
a flashback with Fring, but I don’t see how it could get all the way
back to…
After reading Kieran Healy’s latest
post 
about women and citation patterns in philosophy, I wanted to revisit the
 co-citation graph I had
made of five journals in literary and cultural theory. As I noted, one
of these journals is Signs , which is devoted specifically to feminist
theory. I didn’t think that its presence would skew the results too
much, but…

 
I wanted to modify this
 script 
by Neal Caren to create an adjustable graph that allows you to control
the threshold of citations for nodes that will appear on the graph. If
for example, you wanted to see only those nodes with twenty or more
citations, you can just move the slider over to see those, and the data
will automatically update.
 
 
I have…
I’ve been interested in humanities citation analysis for some time now,
though I had been somewhat frustrated in that work by JSTOR pulling its
citation data from its DfR portal a year or so ago. It was only a day or
two ago with Kieran Healy’s fascinating
 post 
on philosophy citation networks that I noticed that the Web of Science
database has this information…

 
I checked back in to Project Rosalind 
a few days ago, and I noticed that they had added several new problems.
One was the familiar Fibonacci sequence, beloved of introdutory computer
science instruction everywhere. There was also a modified version of the
Fibonacci problem, however, which requires you to compute the sequence
with mortal rabbits .
(The normal…
Of the many interesting things in Matthew Jockers’s Macroanalysis , I
was most intrigued by his discussion of interpreting the topics in topic
models. Interpretation is what literary scholars are trained for and
tend to excel at, and I’m somewhat skeptical of the notion of an
“uninterpretable” topic. I prefer to think of it as a topic that…
1. Ongoing Concerns Matthew Jockers’s Macroanalysis: Digital
Methods & Literary History arrived in the mail yesterday, and I
finished reading just a short while ago. Between it and the recent
 Journal of Digital Humanities 
issue 
on the “Digital Humanities Contribution to Topic Modeling,” I’ve had
quite a lot to read and think about. John
Laudun…
I have been interested in bibliometrics for some time now. Humanities
citation data has always been harder to come by than that of the
sciences, largely because the importance of citation-count as a metric
has never much caught on there. Another important reason is a
generalized distrust and suspicion of quantification in the humanities.
And there are very good reasons to be…
One of my secret vices is reading polemics about whether or not some
group of people, usually
 humanists or
 librarians ,
should learn how to code. What’s meant by “to code” in these discussions
varies quite a lot. Sometimes it’s a markup language. More frequently
it’s an interpreted language (usually python or ruby). I have yet to
come…
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about a simple question: can machine
learning detect patterns of disciplinary change that are at odds with
received understanding? The forms of machine learning that I’ve been
using to try to test this—LDA and the dynamic LDA variant—do a very
good job of picking up the patterns that you would suspect to find in,
say, a…
Ben Schmidt, in a detailed and very useful
post 
about some potential problems with using topic models for humanities
research, wondered why people didn’t commonly build browsers for their
models. For me, the answer was quite simple: I couldn’t figure out how
to get the necessary output files from MALLET to use Allison Chaney’s
 topic modeling…
No one likes gamification or MOOCs, as far as I can tell. What I should
say is that anyone trained in the hermeneutics of suspicion might even
find it hard to accept their existence. It’s hard to come up with a
hypothetical concept that would cry more piteously to the heavens for
critique, for example. True to form, until a few weeks ago I had never
earned a badge in my…
After experimenting with topic models 
of Critical Inquiry , I thought it would be interesting to collect
several of the theoretical journals that JSTOR has in their collection
and run the model on a bigger collection with more topics to see how the
algorithm would chart developments in theory. 
 I downloaded all of the articles (word-frequency data for each article,
that…
When I started experimenting with
graphing changes in topic-proportions over time, I didn’t pay much
attention to the design of the graph. I could see that it was far too
busy, but I assumed that this would be relatively easy to adjust using
 ggplot2 ’s many parameters. 
 It wasn’t. It didn’t take me too long to figure out that I needed to
change the…
I was impressed with Ian Milligan’s
 visualizations 
of Canadian parliamentary
debates ,
and I wanted to try to visualize some of the topic models I’ve been
creating from JSTOR’s Data for Research. 
 ELH I thought would be an interesting journal to try, as it publishes
articles in each issue on quite a range of literary periods, often
ranging from…
When I first began reading about topic modeling, I very much wanted to
experiment with “dynamic” topic modeling, or the tracking of changes in
topics over time. David Blei and John Lafferty describe their algorithm
in this
 paper .
They also have made a dynamic topic model browser of Science 
 available . I was very
impressed with this project and wanted to…
Here are some instructions for creating the same types of topic models
of JSTOR’s journals that I did with Critical
Inquiry and
 Signs . 
 These instructions are designed for someone using a Mac or Linux
platform. (The differences below between using Linux and a Mac should be
apparent to anyone who uses Linux, so I’m not going to indicate them
here;…
Here are two topic models of Critical Inquiry , generated with the same
algorithm but different implementations (MALLET and R topicmodels
package, slightly different stopword lists, the latter also was
generated with a minimum word frequency of seven): 
 0 black music musical white african jazz sound performance american
racial negro song cultural sounds race rap cage singer…