Digital Architextures: Literature, Interpretation, and Computation

Birkbeck, University of London. 12th September 2018.

A book

Professor Martin Paul Eve, Birkbeck, University of London

Character-Based Recurrent Neural Networks

  • Trained on Textual Practice
  • Statistical modelling of character runs
  • Can be pre-trained with word2vec to create accurate semantic embedding
  • ‘The series of temporal inventions of the object is intelligible only afterwards’
  • ‘Slavoj Žižek, Live Fiction, trans. Rushdie and Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Bohestock Press, 1994)’

Emerald City

The Two Versions of Emerald City

Literary Studies, Digital Humanities, and Quantitative Methods

  • “What Digital Humanities is not about, despite its explicit claims, is the use of digital or quantitative methodologies to answer research questions in the humanities” - Allington, Brouillette, Golumbia
  • “Literary Analysis by Computer” - Dartmouth College, 1969
  • A “statistical experiment” - Vernon Lee, 1923

Radical Digital Potential

“Knowledge is non-rivalrous. Your knowledge of a fact or idea does not block mine, and mine does not block yours. Thomas Jefferson described this situation beautifully in an 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson: ‘If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea….Its peculiar character…is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine.’” - Peter Suber

Drivers of Publication

Symbolic Economy

Academic Publisher Profits in the Age of Open Access

  • Elsevier, 2017: $1.2bn [36% margin]
  • Wiley, 2017: $687m [74% margin]
  • Springer Nature, 2017: $714m

Thibault, Robert T., Amanda MacPherson, Stevan Harnad, and Amir Raz, ‘The Rent’s Too High: Self-Archive for Fair Online Publication Costs’, PsyArXiv, 2018, https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hk4gn

Mapping Gravity's Rainbow by kernel density estimation

Gravity's Rainbow

Pynchon and Cow Country

Pynchon and Cow Country

Pynchon and Cow Country

Pynchon and Cow Country

Pynchon and Cow Country

Pynchon and Cow Country

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas Structure

Detecting Anachronism in the Contemporary Historical Novel

Dating the words in Ewing Part I

The Problems of Being "Popular"

Problematic popularity detection in Ewing Part I

Words in Mitchell that are not in COCA

Table

The End

Thank you!

Presentation licensed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Images excluded from CC license. Available to view online at https://meve.io/Inaugural2018.