literature and data

TTR

Unique Words / Total number of words x 100

Distant reading

a digital humanities method for studying literature by analyzing large collections of texts computationally, rather than reading individual texts closely.

situated knowledge

The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular. The science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned rationality.

Matrix of domination

Black Feminist Thought

How systems of power are configured and experienced. It consists of four domains: the structural, the disciplinary, the hegemonic, and the interpersonal

Her emphasis is on the intersection of gender and race, but she makes clear that other dimensions of identity also result unjust oppression or unearned privilege, that become apparent across the same four domains

utf-8

Unicode is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world’s writing systems that can be digitized

Unicode Transformation Format - 8-bit

Project Gutenberg

Founded 1971 by Michael S Hart

As a student at the University of Illinois, Hart was given an perators account with 100 M of computer time for the Xerox Sigma V mainframe computero

Hart typed the American “Declaration of Independence” and other texts.

Holds 60,000 texts that are in the public domain

Many texts were typed by hand

Accessible in plain text and other non-proprietary formats

Run by volunteeers as a not-for-profit

Targets general readers

Majority of content is in English

Crucial resource for computational literary studies

Data is cooked

Data is not a raw input, it is the result of social, political, and historical circumstances

1. Where does the data come from?

2. Who collected it?

3. When?

4. How was it collected?

5. Why was it collected?

Big Dick Data

A formal academic term to denote big data projects that are characterized by patriarchal cis masculinity totalizing fantasies of world domination, fetishizes size, inflates their technical and scientific capabilities

World brain

The rarest and most intricate documents and articles can be studied now at first hand. There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge (microfilm)

Big Data

New technology creates new social and existential trade-offs

Computational literacy will be essential if humanities students are to understand virtual worlds as rhetorical and ideological spaces

In a 2008 Wired article, ‘The End of Theory,’ Anderson made the

now-infamous claim that “the numbers speak for themselves.

Statistical inference is based on the idea of

sampling: that you can infer things about a population (or other large-

scale phenomenon) by studying a random and/ or representative

sample and then mapping those findings back on the population (or

phenomenon) as a whole”

Problems with Big Data

interrogate the context,

limitations, and validity of the data under use. In other words, one

feminist strategy for considering context is to consider the cooking

process that produces “raw” data.

Why are we learning computer code?

Programming is about choices

and constraints, and about how you choose to model some select slice of

the world around you in the formal environment of a computer.”

That is not a liability but their

great asset, allowing them to serve as platforms for propagating

some particular view of reality.”

ew of reality.”

A black sense of place (“FAILURE (MY HEAD WAS FULL OF MISTY FUMES OF

DOUBT),” KATHERINE MCKITTRICK

A black sense of place always calls into question, struggles against,

critiques, undoes, prevailing racist scripts.

Intelligence (Pasquinelli)

We would do well to remember that IQ is, above all, a eugenic

concept, concocted to sort winners from losers and to justify the rules of

the game

From the nineteenth century to the twentieth, the ‘eye of the master’ of

industrial capitalism extended to the whole society and imposed new forms of

control, also based on statistical measurements of ‘intelligence’, to

discriminate workers into classes of skill. This was, for instance, one of the

direct applications of the IQ test according to the US psychologist Lewis

Terman, who argued in 1919 that ‘the IQ of 75 or below belongs ordinarily in

the unskilled labor class, that 75 to 85 is preeminently the range for

semiskilled labor, and that 80 or 85 is ample for success in some kinds of

skilled labor

The

application of artificial intelligence (AI) in self-driving vehicles, among

other artefacts, has changed the perception of manual skills such as driving,

revealing how the most valuable component of work in general has never

been just manual, but has always been cognitive and cooperative as well.

What can TTRs test?

As children’s literature progresses into works for older age groups

(picture books → chapter books → young adult novels), TTR will

increase gradually, approaching adult literature norms.

Macroanalysis

Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (2013)

Co-founded and co-directed, with Franco Moretti, the Lit Lab at

Stanford University.

Recent project: The Bestseller Code, which uses computation to

identify common features of literary bestsellers.

Currently manages the “personalization science” teams for Apple

Books, Podcasts, and Videos

Jockers

Observation is flawed in the same way that generalization from the

specific is flawed: the generalization may be good, it may even explain a

total population, but the selection of the sample is always something less

than perfect

Large language model

is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) program that can recognize

and generate text, among other tasks. LLMs are trained on huge sets

of data — hence the name ‘large. ’

Distant reading

understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by

aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data. We need

distant reading [...] because its opposite, close reading, can’t

uncover the true scope and nature of literature