Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN-13: 9780226734569. pp. 552, $27.50 cloth. Robert J. Sampson’s ...

Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect

The article reviews the book "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History" by Elizabeth Kolbert.

The sixth extinction: an unnatural history.

Atlas Of The European Novel 1800 1900

Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Jim Collins. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 288 pp. $22.95 pbk. During the last two decades, the popularity of books has grown exponentially. According to Bowker, book production through traditional avenues in the United States alone has grown from just over 100,000 titles in 1993 to nearly 300,000 in 2008, and the number of fiction titles has more than doubled. This does not account for the more than 750,000 self-published and print-on-demand books published in 2009 alone. In a nutshell, books are big business. In Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins, professor of film and television and English at the University of Notre Dame, explores the impact of the convergence of literary, visual, and material cultures on the book publishing industry. Collins begins by analyzing the audience - readers, starting with a historical examination, including readers of Ladies Home Journal in the early twentieth century, who were encouraged to "read only the best books" as a means of obtaining culture. He discusses the difference between "high-brow" professional readers - literature scholars and critics - as opposed to "middle-brow" unprofessional readers. As literacy rates have increased, the popularity of books, particularly literary fiction, progressed naturally. By the 1990s, the growth of the book superstores such as Amazon.com, Borders, and Barnes & Noble, along with the rising popularity of book clubs, took book discussions from the hallowed halls of academia into the homes of ordinary, everyday people. Oprah Winfrey's Book Club, for example, created instant bestsellers, although his discussion of Oprah's Anna Karenina show is a laborious and tedious transcript that serves only to challenge Winfrey's authority as the "national librarian" for those Collins views as unprofessional readers. While film adaptations of books have existed since the silent era, Collins presents the "Miramax formula," which garnered the Weinstein Brothers more than 200 Oscar nominations in the last two decades. Many of these book adaptations intertwine sexual passion with a love of all things literary, resulting in a "quality cultural experience" that, combined with intensive marketing, guarantees grand box office success. Collins supports this argument by providing comparative textual analyses of Shakespeare in Love, The English Patient, and The Hours both as books and films. Collins closes by exploring the literary bestseller, and questions what is, indeed, "literary." Should literature be appreciated because one resonates with the characters on the page or is the author's craft more important? …

Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture

This essay presents quantitative capture and predictive modeling for one of the largest and longest running mass reading programs of the past two decades: “One Book One Chicago” (OBOC) sponsored by the Chicago Public Library (CPL). The Reading Chicago Reading project uses data associated with OBOC as a probe into city-scale library usage and, by extension, as a window onto contemporary reading behavior. The first half of the essay explains why CPL’s OBOC program is conducive for modeling purposes, and the second half documents the creation of our models, their underlying data, and the results.

Reading Chicago Reading: Quantitative Analysis of a Repeating Literary Program.

This paper introduces a Literature Compass cluster on Margaret Cavendish. The full cluster is made up of the following articles:



‘Recent Developments in the Study of Seventeenth-Century Literature and Three Papers from the 2007 Margaret Cavendish Conference’, James Fitzmaurice, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00523.x.



‘Filling in the Picture: Contexts and Contacts of Jane Cavendish’, Alexandra G. Bennett, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00524.x.



‘Mrs. Dalloway and the Duchess: Virginia Woolf Reads and Writes Margaret Cavendish’, Lise Mae Schlosser, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00525.x.



‘From Drama to Science: Margaret Cavendish as Vanishing Mediator’, John Shanahan, Literature Compass 5 (2008), DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00526.x.



***



This essay examines Margaret Cavendish's dramatic and scientific works together in order to find shared features among them. What is common in all of her work is a commitment to a form of knowledge I term ‘forensic’. I argue that Cavendish contributed to the conceptual formation of the new science of the seventeenth century in two ways: first, in the imagination of highly forensic spaces (that is, spaces for the examination of rival hypotheses), and second, by focusing on the inherent theatricality of empirical experimentation. But this two-fold contribution was muted and increasingly rendered invisible as the new Royal Society pioneered ways to exploit such forensic spaces in ways Cavendish did not imagine, and developed rhetorical strategies to disavow or manage the theatricality of experimentation. Cavendish's work as a fellow-traveler of the new science, once notable in its time, became – with the triumph of the Royal Society program – a vanishing mediator in the development of experimental science.

From Drama to Science: Margaret Cavendish as Vanishing Mediator

Since fall 2001, the Chicago Public Library (CPL) has chosen fiction and nonfiction around which to organize city-wide public events, book discussions, and other creative programming. This “One Book One Chicago” (OBOC) program has been a successful ongoing civic initiative with great public visibility, with participants ranging from the Mayor of Chicago to countless book group volunteers across the city. Our “Reading Chicago Reading” project—supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities and Microsoft—works to discover how text characteristics, library branch demographics, and promotional activities are linked variables that can be used to predict patron response to future OBOC titles. The OBOC program acts as a recurring experiment in data capture, for each chosen work represents a probe into library usage and, by extension, a window onto the elective reading behavior of the diverse patrons of a major American city. This paper will report comparative circulation data for three recent OBOC choices that are Chicagocentered and three that are not Chicago-centered. The three Chicago-centered books are:

/pdf/real-and-imagined-geography-at-city-scale-sentiment-analysis-1fcwwsugup.pdf

Real and Imagined Geography at City-Scale: Sentiment Analysis of Chicago's "One Book" Program.

Community reading initiatives, in which a book is selected for system-wide reading and discussion, have become common in many library systems. This paper describes the initial findings in a demographic study of the ``One Book, One Chicago'' initiative by the Chicago Public Library. Using a multilevel linear model, we show that, over six recent offerings of the ``One Book'' program, the books vary widely in their uptake by library patrons at different branches, and these differences cannot be entirely explained by demographics or the library's promotional strategies. We thus motivate the next stage of our project, which is to incorporate representations of book content and reader response into the model.

Circulation modeling of library book promotions

Digital humanities scholars are developing new techniques of literary study using non-consumptive processing of large collections of scanned text. A crucial step in working with such collections is to separate the main text of a work from the surrounding paratext, the content of which may distort word counts, location references, sentiment scores, and other important outputs. Simple heuristic methods have been devised, but are not accurate for some texts and some methodological needs. This study describes a method for paratext detection based on smoothed unsupervised clustering. We show that this method is more accurate than simple heuristics, especially for non-fiction works, and edited works with larger amounts of paratext. We also show that a more accurate detection of paratext boundaries improves the accuracy of subsequent text processing, as exemplified by a readability metric.

John Shanahan

Papers

Reading Chicago Reading: Quantitative Analysis of a Repeating Literary Program.

From Drama to Science: Margaret Cavendish as Vanishing Mediator

Real and Imagined Geography at City-Scale: Sentiment Analysis of Chicago's "One Book" Program.

Circulation modeling of library book promotions

Unsupervised clustering with smoothing for detecting paratext boundaries in scanned documents