I thought I’d say a few things about my writing workflow, since I often get questions about my setup, and since there’s a blog carnival happening this month on the topic . I write everything (books, dissertations, articles, blog posts, emails, code) using Emacs , the venerable old text editor which has been in active development since the 1970s. I write using an Emacs mode called Org-mode , which…
I’ve been playing around with some of the Open Library book data, and made an interesting mistake along the way. I incorrectly constructed a regular expression, using a literal question mark instead of an escaped question mark, and ended up with a list of book titles which end in question marks. This was a happy accident, since the results are interesting, and often hilarious, book titles: Isn’t…
There’s a lot of talk these days about “next-generation dissertations” and “digital dissertations.” See, for example, Electronic Theses and Dissertations , The Sage Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses , and Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities (Fox; Andrews; Kuhn and Finger) . Syracuse University and Katina Rogers recently launched an…
In my last post, I argued that PDFs, Word documents, and similar electronic file formats are stuck trying to mimic paper, and that we should consider replacing these with screen-first file formats which liberate them from the constraints of pagination. So where does that put the famous MLA-style research paper, the standard format for English departments nationwide? Here, I argue for a new style…
We should stop pretending that we’re all still using paper. At least, speaking for myself and my academic work, email is much more common than paper mail, ebooks are rapidly growing in popularity, and journals are mostly accessed electronically. The global pandemic has driven us even further in digitization. More and more, we sign contracts, pay our electrical bills, and even get our drivers’…
This is a continuation of my previous post, describing my notetaking system. I keep a Zettelkasten using org-roam. Notes are connected using links, which are actually just regular org-mode links. Those links look like this behind the scenes: [[URL][link title]] . Thus, there is an implicit relation between two notes where, if a link to note B appears in note A, you could express that relationship…
Here’s what my notetaking system currently looks like: Network visualization of my notes, via Org-roam-server And here’s how I got there. In my 10+ years as a graduate student, at three different institutions, I’ve tried so many notetaking systems. I started on paper, with the Cornell Note methodology. . Then, once I got a laptop, I moved to web-based utilities, like Evernote . After one of these,…
On Calendar Reform Let’s face it: the Gregorian calendar is a mess. There are a serious number of problems with it, but let’s list just a few: Months have different numbers of days. This not only means that school children have to rote-learn mnemonics for which months have thirty days (“thirty days have September, April, June…”), but that we can’t use a month as a unit of time, in any practical…
Like most, my first step into the blogging world was through WordPress. But after a few years of wrangling plugins, handing endless updates, dealing with custom CSS issues, and paying for shared web hosting, the idea of using a static site generator seemed more attractive. Whereas WordPress sites are dynamically generated on a web server, static sites are just made up of good old HTML pages, and…
I’ve had a lot of questions lately about my online teaching methods lately, so I thought I’d share my rationale behind them. The course I’m currently teaching, Introduction to Computational Literary Analysis , in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, has a unique technological stack: A course website . It’s built using Haskell and the static site generator…
In 1887, Thomas Mendenhall , a self-taught physicist, published an article in Science called “The Characteristic Curve of Composition,” in which he studies mathematical properties of sentences written by fiction writers of the day. As an early work of quantitative literary analysis which preexisted the field of digital humanities by many decades, I like to think of it as nonetheless a “digital”…
Recently, I’ve become interested in the problem of literary style. One of its great difficulties involves the separation of a writer’s stylistic signal from that of his or her era, nation, idiom, dialect, or chosen literary genre. Ideally, one might construct a corpus that controls for most of these variables, so that the style itself can be studied more easily. But since such corpora are hard to…
This notebook originally accompanied a workshop I gave at NYCDH Week, in February of 2019, called “Advanced Topics in Word Embeddings.” (In truth, it’s only somewhat advanced. With a little background in NLP, this could even serve as an introduction to the subject.) You can run the code in a Binder, here . Word embeddings are among the most discussed subjects in natural language processing, at the…
What is a chapter, really? Inspired by Nicholas Dames’s work on the history of the chapter ( some of which appeared in the New Yorker a few years ago as “The Chapter: A History” ), I’ve started investigating this question. We all have an intuition about chapters—how long they should be, their temporal scope, what they generally contain. Most of us, if given a paragraph chosen at random from a…
As one of the first digital libraries, Project Gutenberg has lived through a few generations of computers, digitization techniques, and textual infrastructures. It’s not surprising, then, that the corpus is fairly messy. Early transcriptions of some electronic texts, hand-keyed using only uppercase letters, were succeeded by better transcriptions, but without replacing the early versions. As such,…
Project Gutenberg is a large store of public domain electronic texts, one which has been around since the 70s. Nearly everyone that has experimented with computational literary analysis has at some point used their electronic texts. Many digital humanists undoubtedly share my frustrations with it: its interface is clunky, its metadata is incomplete, and it’s not very friendly to computational text…
The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night’s hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good…
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales exhibits one of the richest vocabularies of Middle English literature, a vocabulary that reveals influences from a number of native and foreign languages: Old English, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, among others. While some of this foreign influence may be attributed simply to the history of the English language—the Roman Empire, the Norman conquest of 1066, and…
In James Joyce’s novel Ulysses , the school headmaster Mr. Deasy quotes Shakespeare in a lecture in financial responsibility to his employee Stephen Dedalus. “[W]hat does Shakespeare say?” he asks, “Put but money in thy purse” (Joyce 1986, 25). As Stephen remembers it, however, this is not merely a saying of Shakespeare’s, but one spoken by Shakespeare’s infamous character Iago. So while Deasy…
In the influential 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” the mathematician Claude Shannon conducts a thought experiment to construct an algorithmic approximation of language. The algorithm can be described like this: Choose a book at random from your bookshelf, and open to a random page. Choose a random word on that page. Record this word. Open another book at random, and read until…
If you do computational analyses of books, and need to break up the book’s text file into its constituent chapters, I’ve just released a tool that you might find useful. It’s called chapterize , and it breaks a book into chapters. This is how it works: # First, get a copy of Chapterize: git clone https://github.com/JonathanReeve/chapterize.git # Change into that directory: cd chapterize # Now grab…
One of Milton’s terms for the expansive, empty gulf separating the Earth from Hell is the “abyss.” The word appears eighteen times in Paradise Lost , and in seven out of twelve of the poem’s books. It is variously described as “vast,” “dark,” “infinite,” “hollow,” “wild,” “wide,” “desolate,” and “vexed,” (1.21, 2.405, 2.518, 2.910, 3.84, 4.936, 10.314) but also more epistemologically as…
Or, Computational Poetic Generation as Literary Analysis Note: this project may also be found here, in its original format as an iPython notebook . “In so far as it represented man’s harnessing of energy through craft, the machine became the most characteristic emblem of the Vorticist movement, more significant … than the vortex itself.” (Bush 36) Ezra Pound’s Cantos , whether understood as…
I’m proud to introduce macroetym, a command-line tool for macro-etymological textual analysis, which is now available for download with the Python package manager, pip. It’s a complete rewrite of The Macro-Etymological Analyzer , the web tool for macro-etymological analysis I wrote a few years ago, first described in this post , and presented at DH2014 . It can now analyze any number of texts, and…
Works of literary criticism are typically built around their central arguments. The argument is often an opinion about a theme, function, or other textual attribute, and it is presented along with textual evidence that supports it. This usually means that a critical work closely examines textual details that are relevant to its thesis, while moving past or even ignoring less relevant details.…
A vibrant discussion followed my March 15th post, “A Proposal for a Corpus Sharing Protocol.” . Carrie Schroeder , Allen Riddel and others on Twitter pointed out that, especially in non-English DH fields, many corpora are already on GitHub. These include texts from the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association , the Open Greek and Latin Project at Leipzig, and papyri from the Integrating…
[This is a preprint of my paper, published in Reading Modernism with Machines , by Palgrave Macmillan in December 2016, reposted from the original draft.] The English language is a palimpsest, bearing traces of the languages it has contacted. French, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Irish are among the languages that have contributed words to English, and these ancestor languages comprise modes of…
At I Annotate this weekend, I made a bookmarklet that will allow you to generate an Annotag from a book’s bibliographic entry: Tweet This Book To use it: Drag the button above onto your bookmarks bar. Visit a website that has books. It currently works with Worldcat and Project Gutenberg . Click the bookmarklet. Add a location suffix to the hashtag, if you want, like :p26 . Tweet a comment about…
Digital humanists working in computational text analysis need a better way to share corpora. Following is a rough sketch of a way to share texts in way that facilitates collaboration, provides for easy error correction, and adheres as much as possible to decentralized, open-source, and open-access models. Problems The Problem of Corpus Availability Franco Moretti gave a talk at NYU two weeks ago,…
“in the imitation of these twain–who as Ulysses says, opinion crowns with an imperial voice–many are infect.” –Nestor, Troilus and Cressida , Act 1, Scene 3. The following describes an experiment in digital literary analysis, wherein dialog from Shakespeare plays was extracted, categorized, and statistically analyzed using a variety of methods. Dialog from Shakespeare’s kings, for instance, such…
In an 1873 review in the Galaxy , Henry James criticizes George Eliot’s Middlemarch as he might a painting: “it abounds in fine shades, but it lacks, we think, the great dramatic chiaroscuro ” (579). Although James is using the term metaphorically, to denote sweeping emotions and narrative flux, the same could be said of the visual mise-en-scène of the novel. The presence of literal light and…
Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves is structured as a series of dialogues and monologues by six characters. Some of these speeches are as short as a line, but most are between a few paragraphs and a chapter in length. Their extremely regular structure takes this form: ‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’ (Woolf 9) There is a short…
Following my initial spec for Annotags , a decentralized literary annotation protocol, I’ve just posted the first rough version of a webapp designed to encode and decode the tags. Now you can annotweet books, plays, poems, and other texts with shortened ISBNs, thus saving precious microblogging characters. For example, my first annotweet using this system annotates the Folger Library Shakespeare…
Walt Whitman, in addition to being a poet, was somewhat of an amateur etymologist. He calls the English language “an enormous treasure-house, or range of treasure houses, arsenals, granary, chock full with so many contributions … from Spaniards, Italians and the French” (quoted in LeMaster, 226). In the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass , he summarizes the history of English word…
Note: this post refers to an older version of macro-etym, a text analysis tool which is now a CLI utility, here . Here’s a sneak preview of my latest project, a macro-etymological textual analyzer web app . It’s an abstract, complete with preliminary results, which I recently prepared to submit to DH2014 . Here’s a PDF file version: Abstract: Macro-Etymological Analyzer (237K PDF), and the full…
I was invited to hack around on the Open Syllabus project this past Saturday, which I was really excited to do. They’ve scraped the web and come up with around 1.5 million syllabi, and only just released their API to researchers this weekend. I wanted to run some computational analyses on these syllabi, to attempt questions like: What were the most frequently assigned texts in freshman composition…
Have you ever wanted to livetweet a book? I often want to. Yet there doesn’t seem to be a standard way of doing that. You could tweet, for instance, “Oh Captain Wentworth! When will you propose? #JaneAustenPersuasion” but the hashtag isn’t standardized, so some people might be tweeting under #Persuasion and others under #AustenPersuasion. Furthermore, the hashtag isn’t specific enough to make it…