Author Archives: Matthew Wilkens

DH Grad Course Reflections

This past semester I taught a grad seminar on digital humanities, one with more technical content than has been the case in my previous (undergrad) DH classes. On the whole, it went shockingly well; my students came in with very little background in either programming or statistical or quantitative analysis, and they left with enough of each of those things to do genuinely interesting work on their final projects. More importantly, they now know enough to go much further in the future, which many of them are already promising/threatening to do. I’m very pleased.

A few thoughts on specific aspects of the class and the syllabus. (NB. I posted an initial syllabus back in September, but it had some holes toward the end of the semester; the final, complete version (PDF) is now available.)

I was especially pleased with the response to the weekly problem sets, which were difficult and time consuming. The students ended up mostly working together in study groups, often meeting on campus over the weekend to finish the exercises for Monday’s seminar. This was exactly what I was hoping would happen. There’s no getting around the fact that programming, like language learning, requires hours and days of hands-on practice. Problem sets are an odd form in the humanities and I know there were students who thought the exercises consumed too much time or required more groping for answers than they would have liked, but I think this part of the course worked exactly as designed. I’m glad everyone was willing and able to struggle productively with them. On a semi-related front, grad school can be an isolating experience; one of the very few things I missed about chemistry when I moved to an English PhD program was the camaraderie and feedback I got from group work in the sciences. The problem sets were an opportunity to bring more collaborative structure to an English PhD program.

The biggest problem we faced was lack of time. This is a course that wants to be an intro to programming, an intro to statistics, a survey of recent work in DH (broadly defined), a theoretical treatment of digital media, a chance to think about the future of the discipline, and a grad-level seminar on nineteenth-century American fiction (nineteenth century rather than twentieth due to corpus constraints). We spent two weeks at the beginning of the semester on media studies (McLuhan, Galloway); that was fun, but it was ultimately to the side of our main concerns. The time could have been more profitably spent on an extra week of intro programming concepts and another week later in the semester on advanced computational topics.

The exercises from The Programming Historian were invaluable and I recommend them to anyone teaching a similar course. But/and I’d add a week of more introductory proper CS concepts (branching, looping, variables, return values, etc.) before beginning them. This is true even though the PH exercises really do start from “Hello, world”; they then ramp up by way of very concrete examples, which the students sometimes found difficult to separate from the concepts those examples were meant to convey.

I’d spend two weeks (rather than one) on mapping and GIS, which was popular and useful for several final projects.

I’d also spend more time on visualization in general, maybe assigning Tufte’s book and all of Yau’s (rather than just one chapter). An additional merit of Yau’s book is that it would provide some intro to R, which the students said they’d like.

I’d assign all of Jockers’ Macroanalysis once it’s available. Many thanks to Matt for sharing a handful of draft chapters with us.

Not sure it’s worth reviewing in depth the merits of individual articles and chapters (of which we read many); by the time I teach this course again in a year or two, most of those will probably drop off in favor of newer results. This is both the joy and the frustration of teaching DH at the moment.

Geolocation Correction at Uses of Scale

I’ve just posted a writeup and some data on hand-corrected geolocation extraction over at the Uses of Scale site (associated with the Mellon grant Ted Underwood and I are running). The idea is to share as much as possible of the tediously achieved process stuff that’s required for computational research but that isn’t itself “achieved” results. In addition to my post on geography, these’s also information (from Ted and others) on OCR correction and on removing running headers from scanned texts. Not always sexy, but we hope it’ll help others do related work without having to start entirely from scratch. And I suppose we’re also selfishly hoping for feedback and improvements from anyone else who might have experience dealing with related issues.

Books I Read in 2012

As in past years, here’s a list of the new (to me) fiction I read this year. Criticism and rereads are excluded.

  • Döblin, Alfred. Berlin Alexanderplatz. (1929) Feel like I should have gotten more from this.
  • Farrell, J.G. Troubles. (1970) Not a fan.
  • Gass, William H. The Tunnel. (1995) Equal parts intriguing and frustrating.
  • Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. (2007) Of some professional interest re: memoir-like fiction.
  • Dyer, Geoff. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. (2009)
  • Houellebecq, Michel. The Map and the Territory. (2010)
  • Banks, Russell. Lost Memory of Skin. (2011)
  • Phillips, Arthur. The Tragedy of Arthur. (2011) I like Phillips a lot, but my interest waned.
  • Russell, Karen. Swamplandia! (2011) Taught this; an interesting failure, I think.
  • Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. (2011) Taught this, too. Liked it even more after reading Andy Hoberek’s piece on it in CL.
  • Johnson, Adam. The Orphan Master’s Son. (2012) Liked this.
  • Marcus, Ben. The Flame Alphabet. (2012) Didn’t do much for me; too precious by half.
  • Miller, Madeline. The Song of Achilles. (2012) Am liking this a lot.
  • Stein, Leigh. The Fallback Plan. (2012)

An enjoyable year, as always. I particularly liked Zone One and Song of Achilles (the latter of which I’m still working on). Not sure where I’ll start in 2013; I’m a couple of chapters into The Book of Happenstance by Ingrid Winterbach (which I like so far) and I have a handful of others waiting on my Kindle.

Digital Humanities Grad Syllabus

I’m teaching a graduate seminar on digital humanities this semester, ENGL 90127 (yes, Notre Dame has insane course numbers). The class involves a small amount of media studies (McLuhan, Galloway) and a whole lot of computational and quantitative work (both lit reviews and extensive hands-on practice). I’m excited about this; I’ve taught some version of DH many times in the past, but never with this degree of technical expectation. My students have been great so far and I’m looking forward to the programming work.

A PDF of the initial syllabus is available for those who are interested. As you’ll see, I’ve left some of the details fuzzy toward the end in order to respond to student needs and interests. Will try to remember to post a final version at the end of the semester that reflects the specifics.

[Update: The final syllabus and some reflections on the course are now available.]

Population Growth and Literary Attention

I just posted an item about the literary uses of Chicago and New Orleans on the new Scalable Reading group blog (to which Martin Mueller, Ted Underwood, and Steve Ramsay are also contributors). A brief preview:

There’s a lot of jitter in the New Orleans numbers, but a couple of things seem clear:

  1. Through most of the period 1851–75, there’s much more literary attention paid to New Orleans than to Chicago.
  2. Interest in Chicago picks up meaningfully after about 1870.
  3. Interest in New Orleans wanes a bit around the same time, but only to the extent that the two cities occur at about equal rates in the last few years of the corpus.

…

[And in sum:] I’m sure there’s some novelty-driven interest in emerging cities and demographic changes, but at least in the case of Chicago and New Orleans, it doesn’t appear to be the dominant factor driving literary attention.

This is also a chance to put in a plug for Scalable Reading, both the blog and the concept. Well worth a read, I think, my own contribution notwithstanding.

Fish’s Object

Stanley Fish has a piece in the New York Times today that makes some use of my contribution to Debates in the Digital Humanities. The DH Debates collection isn’t online yet, but similar work of mine can be found in Post45 and (with updates) in the proceedings of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (PDF).

Jeremy Rosen anticipated most of what Fish says in his lengthy response to the Post45 essay. My reply to Rosen probably works equally well as a response to Fish.

Here I’ll only add that while I appreciate the attention, I have my doubts about Fish’s sincerity when he proposes to defend the pursuit of authorial intent (in Milton, no less!).

[My colleague Steve Fallon—the distinguished Miltonist—observes that Fish frequently uses a different, constructivist account of imputed authorial intent in his own criticism. But I’d maintain that this is sufficiently different from the naïve version offered in the column as to be an entirely distinct thing.]

Update: Ted Underwood has a smart reply on the relationship between theory and experiment or, more humanistically, where our ideas come from.

Update 2: Mark Lieberman at Language Log runs some revealing numbers on the P’s and B’s in Areopagitica that were part of Fish’s set piece.

Update 3: Martin Mueller has a long and wide-ranging response to Fish’s series of articles, including a defense-cum-clarification of my own work. Worth a read and I thank him for it.

A Wee Debate in Post45 Contemporaries

Earlier this year, Andy Hoberek published a piece of mine called “Contemporary Fiction by the Numbers” in his Contemporaries section of Post45. There’s now a response up from Jeremy Rosen and a reply from me. The substance of the thing concerns the best uses of computational methods in literary and cultural studies.

Mostly, though, it’s good to have another excuse to link to Post45 in general and Contemporaries in particular. They’re on my own required reading list.

Books I Read in 2011

As I did last year and the year before, here’s a list of books I read for the first time in 2011. Mostly confined to fiction, but including two popular-academic books that I (uncharacteristically) read from cover to cover.

  • Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Half of a Yellow Sun (2008).
  • Aira, César. The Literary Conference (2010).
  • Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities (1978).
  • Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red (1998).
  • DeLillo, Don. Libra (1988). [Ducks head in shame.]
  • Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010).
  • Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011).
  • Johns, Adrian. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2010).
  • McCarthy, Tom. Remainder (2007).
  • Miéville, China. The City and the City (2009).
  • Millet, Lydia. Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005).
  • O’Brien, Tim. In the Lake of the Woods (1994).
  • Sayles, John. A Moment in the Sun (2011).
  • Vollmann, William. Europe Central (2005).
  • Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King (2011).

Not a record-breaking effort, I’d say, but a pretty fun year. I didn’t get to either Theroux or Esterházy as I’d hoped, but there’s always next year, right? Same goes for Dickens — I picked up and put down Our Mutual Friend a couple of times and keep meaning to go back to it. Oh, and I’m maybe twenty pages into Arthur Phillips’ The Tragedy of Arthur, which seems nifty so far. I’ve gotten a couple of other recommendations, but am always happy to have more …

Two Interesting Job Openings

I’ve recently received word of two intriguing DH jobs that might be of interest to some readers:

  1. The three-year Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellowship in Digital Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. I was at WashU last year and worked closely with many of the folks involved in this program. It’s a terrific place with great people — really, one of the best experiences of my academic life. I can’t endorse it highly enough. And this newly created fellowship is generous indeed.
  2. A Research Assistant Professorship to serve as Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at South Carolina. An interesting research/admin hybrid at an important DH center.

Named Localities

Following on my last post about choropleth maps and regional densities, here are a couple of quick figures showing specific named locations at the city level and below (‘bare’ mentions of nations and regions/states alone are excluded) in the same nineteenth-century literary corpus, scaled by number of occurrences:

Localities AllYears

The biggies are New York, D.C., Boston, London, Paris, etc. Compare this to the log version, which seemed more useful in the density case:

Localities AllYears Log

Looks to me like the log version is less clear for this type of figure.

A few notes:

1. These figures include all the texts from 1851-75; still working on year-by-year figures and an animation. Won’t be hard.

2. A couple of things to check out in the near future. (a.) How does the density of named localities compare to that of named regions and nations? Consider Africa in particular, where there’s decent national density in some cases, but perhaps less geographic specificity. (b.) I need to produce a state-level density map that subtracts some measure of population from the number of named location mentions to get a sense of which states received a disproportionate share of literary attention.

3. These maps were produced using the ‘maps’ package in R. Really simple to use. Method cribbed from Nathan Yau’s Visualize This.

4. The top few cities:

Place Count
New York, NY, USA 9183
Washington D.C., DC, USA 4179
Boston, MA, USA 3951
Paris, France 3312
London, UK 3279
Rome, Italy 2154
Philadelphia, PA, USA 2058
New Orleans, LA, USA 1580
Richmond, VA, USA 1152
Jerusalem, Israel 925
Charleston, SC, USA 885
Baltimore, MD, USA 709
San Francisco, CA, USA 682