Showing papers by "Ted Underwood published in 2018"
13 Feb 2018
TL;DR: This paper explored the changing significance of gender in fiction, asking especially whether its prominence in characterization has varied from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Abstract: This essay explores the changing significance of gender in fiction, asking especially whether its prominence in characterization has varied from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first We have reached twoconclusions, which may seem in tension with each other The first is that gen-der divisions between characters have become less sharply marked over the last 170 years
71 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that critics are bad at understanding narrative form as something that takes time, and instead they try to convert narrative into a timeless structure, or condense stories into a few scenes that convey the meaning of the whole.
Abstract: <341> Seventeen years ago, in an essay titled “Formalism and Time,” Catherine Gallagher argued that critics are bad at understanding narrative form as something that takes time.1 Instead we try to convert narrative into a timeless structure, or condense stories into a few scenes that convey the meaning of the whole. Whether it’s Jane Eyre walking back and forth on the third story of Thornfield, or Gabriel Conroy watching the snow fall outside his window, we understand fiction by identifying moments of heightened significance. These could be epiphanies or anticlimaxes. In Gallagher’s view the value of these scenes depends less on their specific content than on their rhetorical function, which is to reconcile time with timelessness. She sees critical tradition as deeply shaped by Walter Pater’s dream of cheating death by embracing ephemerality in the form of a single “hard gem-like” moment that, paradoxically, becomes eternal.2 A moving aspiration, but also, according to Gallagher, a way of undervaluing the dailiness of life, and long Victorian novels. This would be an interesting argument under any circumstances, but it’s a particularly remarkable thing for Gallagher to have written in the year 2000, when she was also collaborating with Stephen Greenblatt on a theoretical defense of New Historicism. After all, the New Historicist critic does for historical time exactly what Gallagher’s Paterian critic does for narrative—that is, condense it into a brief scene (an anecdote) that
7 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: Existing measures of textual similarity (cosine similarity on tf-idf vectors or topic vectors) are compared to new strategies that strive to anchor textual measurement in a social context.
Abstract: Measuring similarity is a basic task in information retrieval, and now often a building-block for more complex arguments about cultural change. But do measures of textual similarity and distance really correspond to evidence about cultural proximity and differentiation? To explore that question empirically, this paper compares textual and social measures of the similarities between genres of English-language fiction. Existing measures of textual similarity (cosine similarity on tf-idf vectors or topic vectors) are also compared to new strategies that use supervised learning to anchor textual measurement in a social context.
2 citations
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: This project seeks to pilot a classification process using manually assigned ground truth on a subset of volumes from the HathiTrust, and suggests full-scale deployment of a statistical classifier on a large corpus of literature in order to assemble a disability corpus.
Abstract: As literary text opens to researchers for distant reading, the computational analysis of large corpora of text for literary scholarship, problems beyond typical data science roadblocks, such as data scale and statistical significance of findings have emerged. For scholars studying character and social representation in literature, the identification of characters within the given classes of study is crucial, painstaking, and often a manual process. However, for characters with disabilities, manual identification is prohibitively difficult to undertake at scale, and especially challenging given the coded textual markers that can be used to refer to disability. There currently exists no corpus of characters in fiction with disabilities, which is the first step to at-scale computational study of this topic. This project seeks to pilot a classification process using manually assigned ground truth on a subset of volumes from the HathiTrust. Having successfully built and evaluated a Naïve Bayes classifier, we suggest full-scale deployment of a statistical classifier on a large corpus of literature in order to assemble a disability corpus. This project also covers preliminary exploratory textual analysis of characters with disabilities to yield potential research questions for further exploration.
1 citations
Proceedings Article•
01 Aug 2018
TL;DR: The authors compare textual and social measures of the similarities between genres of English-language fiction, and compare existing measures of textual similarity (cosine similarity on tf-idf vectors or topic vectors) are also compared to new strategies that strive to anchor textual measurement in a social context.
Abstract: Measuring similarity is a basic task in information retrieval, and now often a building-block for more complex arguments about cultural change. But do measures of textual similarity and distance really correspond to evidence about cultural proximity and differentiation? To explore that question empirically, this paper compares textual and social measures of the similarities between genres of English-language fiction. Existing measures of textual similarity (cosine similarity on tf-idf vectors or topic vectors) are also compared to new strategies that strive to anchor textual measurement in a social context.