These are a few of the things about which I’ve written in some sustained way here on the blog, but that might be hard to find on their own. Unlike some folks in digital humanities, I tend to focus on formal publications rather than interactive or archival sites, which is to say that not everything makes it to the blog in full form, alas.

Literary Geography

You can catch most of the posts related to literary geography under the ‘geo’ tag. A few highlights:

• I’ve been awarded an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship to pursue this research at very large scale using the HathiTrust corpus. Details and links in this post.
• My long article in ALH on U.S. literary geography around the Civil War. The is the piece to consult for the best versions of the maps, figures, and arguments that I initially developed here on the blog.
• A related talk from the Uses of Scale in Literary Studies meeting at Illinois.
• A short piece on population growth and literary attention on Martin Mueller’s Scalable Reading blog.

NovelTM: Text Mining the Novel

I’m a member of the large international research team on the NovelTM project led by Andrew Piper at McGill. The aim of our work is “to produce the first large-scale cross-cultural study of the novel according to quantitative methods.” Full details and news items are available on the NovelTM site.

Evaluating Part of Speech Taggers

A while back, a tested some part of speech taggers and posted a bit of related work on using parts of speech to help assess allegorical content. You can see all of these posts under the ‘pos’ tag. Some examples:

• Conclusions re: POS taggers.
• A coda to those conclusions.
• Application of POS tagging to allegory in the MONK corpus.

Coetzee’s Disgrace

I wrote a series of posts on Disgrace in preparation for an article that hasn’t yet materialized. The original impetus was a piece by Liz Anker in MFS.

Books I’ve Read

At the start of every year, I write down the books I read over the last twelve months. I don’t suspect many people care, but I wish others would do the same, because I enjoy seeing what people have been reading. So I figure the least I can do is to produce my own lists for the cause. You can find all of them, dating back to 2009, under the search “Books I Read in” (click for results, newest first).

Book Publishing Stats

I really haven’t done much with this, but Google keeps leading people to my post “How Many New Novels are Published Each Year?” (Short answer: Probably more than 100,000 in English, globally, with a large fraction of that in the US.)