@lindsaythomas.net
academic and aspiring person who likes winter. contemporary lit, digital stuff. i’ve written about sci fi, national security and fiction, the humanities, bunkers, and chatbots. now writing about novels and how long they are. https://lindsaythomas.net
There are a number but this is the one we are teaching today (Ted also on this paper). They take Ted’s data and use it to train a classifier to model elapsed narrative time across ~53,000 volumes. It’s wild bc this allows one to identify particular *words* assoc w longer or shorter elapsed times
They exist, just published in CS venues, mostly. But also, some of us over on the lit side are still working on related problems, however slowly….(I’ve been working forever on a project about how the lengths of long novels change across the 20th cen and what this says about the prestige of length)
Yes thinking about this sort of blew my mind. In my lecture I try to emphasize the weirdness and coolness of this finding!
Yes I read this while preparing my lecture! Probably should incorporate it into the next iteration of the class.
It’s a fun essay!
Less clear if the little formalists in my students are as happy (probably not). But I’m going to do my best to get them there today
One of the things keeping me afloat is that today I teach one of my favorite essays in recent years, Ted Underwood’s “Why Literary Time is Measured in Minutes” alongside Yauney et al’s “update” from a year later, after teaching Genette last week. The little formalist in me is so happy
I’m so glad it will be useful! Also: hi! Enjoy ski lessons (jealous)!
Ours is not a “real class” because students are taking it on top of their other courses (so very minimal readings/assignments), but I’ve done what I call a journal review presentation the past two years and it’s gone well. Could easily be expanded: lindsaythomas.net/engl6000f25/...
Brief but forceful interview here from the front lines of the war against knowledge and thought:
www.austinchronicle.com/news/ut-head...
If DH is dead, we are having a hell of a funeral at ACH this summer!
Abstracts are due soon, on the conference theme of borders, emergency and emergence, and technology's role in responding to our present moment. ACH is affordable and online!
The Board unexpectedly postponed the this year’s tenure decisions. “I was shocked and sick at heart to learn that four of my colleagues who did everything asked of them, and who should have been celebrating their achievement, are now in an indefinite limbo without any clear explanation as to why.”
@kmcdono.bsky.social @danielwilson.bsky.social and I have a new OA article out: eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A... It’s about the fragmented landscape of historical data, and what we can do about it to improve discoverability, sustainability and reuse.
(And because I was assiduously careful to try to avoid posting the words “digital humanities” on Twitter from about 2011-2018 or so. Still traumatized from 2010s DH Discourse™️)
I was! Though honestly I felt it less because of where I did my PhD (a very DH friendly place) and because I was just lucky to land in places where departments advertised those jobs because they genuinely wanted to hire in the area (or at least they never let on otherwise to me)
But then people did those hires and the moment passed and DH became a bit more normalized and at many places admin and maybe some faculty can look around and go, “well, we already have one of those,” or “we did that already” and move on to the next thing (which is, broadly, no hiring at all)
But also DH had a “moment” in the 2010s, whether you loved it or hated it, and some university admin used that moment to hire in something they perceived as “the humanities of the future” or something (which, ew), or they were more susceptible to convincing by faculty to hire in this area.
Great question. It’s most likely a combination of things, including the pandemic and what hiring has looked like in our discipline after that (somehow much worse than before) and maybe some backlash to DH among faculty.
This got a genuine chortle. I’ve been thinking it could be a real moonshot era in the humanities more generally, but perhaps “DH whale fall era” is more accurate. In either case, it’s an extreme trajectory
Gotchu Scott
Thank you! And thank you @mattwilkens.bsky.social
Ted I’ll send you a copy right now!
This is the most I think I’ve ever posted on Bluesky at once so I’ll end it here but thanks to Matt (who I don’t think is on here) for helping me to articulate some things that have been rattling around for some time and that are especially salient for me right now bc of my Debates in DH co-editing
Do I think quantitative or computational work is the only way to achieve this? No. Do I want to see it take over lit studies? No. Would it be nice to be able to tell interested lit studies grad students (they still exist, somehow) anything other than, “you’ll have to learn this on your own?” Yes.
I want to see more work, and more people, in literary studies itself. I want some of the resources of other disciplines, resources they are using to study lit, for example, to also flow our way
On the other hand, when folks in other disciplinary contexts do this they understandably produce work that is in line with their disciplinary contexts. To go back to what I said above, I want to see more of this work in lit studies bc despite it all I love our discipline & the q’s we ask
Since moving to Cornell I’ve worked more w fac and grad students in InfoSci, for example, and it’s great! The ppl I’ve encountered are curious about what I do and about literature more generally. To me, this is very good and I’d like to see more of it! More people studying literature! Yes!
The part that both excites me and simultaneously makes me feel a bit, I don’t know, sad I guess, is what Matt says about the uptake of humanistic research in other disciplines. This is not because I think that’s Bad.
This is just another way of saying that I love mixed methods work, I guess. Archival research? Yes! Data collection? Yes! Quantitative analysis? Yes! Close reading? Yes! Case studies? Yes! Theoretical speculation? Yes! Let’s do it all why not
It demonstrates how these methods can also be “more humanistic,” and how we as humanists, with our deep disciplinary expertise, can utilize them in ways that make sense for our disciplinary contexts.