Topic Stability, Part 2
In my previous post I tried to illustrate how different runs of the same topic modelling process can produce topics that appear to be slightly semantically different from one another. If you keep k and...
View ArticleGender Trouble: Literary Studies’ He/She Problem
Pronouns have become a hot topic of late and I thought it would be interesting to explore their use in the new JSTOR data set that I have been working on that represents 60 years of literary studies...
View ArticleThe great ________ novel: How scholars classify the novel
Ever since Fotis Jannidis posted a graph on novel classification a few years ago I have been inspired to do something similar in English. What are the ways in which scholars over the past half-century...
View ArticleOn Colons, or Standardization in Literary Studies
Sometimes things don’t need to be complicated. Have you ever wondered about the convention of using colons in titles of academic articles? As in, “Here’s my big idea: now let me narrow it down for...
View ArticleDoes the decline of gender within literary studies matter?
A little while back I posted on the unmoving ratio between male/female pronouns in a data set of ~60,000 articles in literary studies. The ratio has been stable at about 2:1 since the mid-1990s. While...
View ArticleAre academics more unequal than athletics? A new collaboration by Brian Powell
Our latest lab collaboration was created by McGill undergraduate Brian Powell. As a college basketball fan, he was interested in whether the high levels of institutional inequality within academic...
View ArticleThe scientization of literary studies
In a new work out, I have teamed-up with my collaborator Stephania DeGaetano-Ortlieb to try to model what we call “the scientization of literary study.” The study of literature has historically been...
View ArticleHow do disciplines change?
Over the past few years I’ve become interested in better understanding how my own discipline works. As someone whose work has changed considerably over the past decade, it’s probably a predictable...
View ArticleMeasuring Unreading
In a new piece out in the Goethe Yearbook, I and my co-author, student James Manalad, use text re-use algorithms to better understand citational practices within scholarly publications. In particular...
View ArticleLet the hypothesis testing begin
We believe that a turn toward hypothesis testing will help us become more aware of exactly what we are doing and why we are doing it. I have a new piece out with Matt Erlin in Public Books. In it we...
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