Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

This is a review of Collected Works of John Tate. Parts I, II, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 2016. For several decades it has been clear to the friends and colleagues of John Tate that a “Collected Works” was merited. The award of the Abel Prize to Tate in 2010 added impetus, and finally, in Tate’s ninety-second year we have these two magnificent volumes, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate. For an overview of Tate’s work, the editors refer the reader to [4]. Before discussing the volumes, I describe some of Tate’s work. 1. Hecke L-series and Tate’s thesis Like many budding number theorists, Tate’s favorite theorem when young was Gauss’s law of quadratic reciprocity. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student in 1946, he was fortunate to find there the person, Emil Artin, who had discovered the most general reciprocity law, so solving Hilbert’s ninth problem. By 1920, the German school of algebraic number theorists (Hilbert, Weber, . . .) together with its brilliant student Takagi had succeeded in classifying the abelian extensions of a number field K: to each group I of ideal classes in K, there is attached an extension L of K (the class field of I); the group I determines the arithmetic of the extension L/K, and the Galois group of L/K is isomorphic to I. Artin’s contribution was to prove (in 1927) that there is a natural isomorphism from I to the Galois group of L/K. When the base field contains an appropriate root of 1, Artin’s isomorphism gives a reciprocity law, and all possible reciprocity laws arise this way. In the 1930s, Chevalley reworked abelian class field theory. In particular, he replaced “ideals” with his “idèles” which greatly clarified the relation between the local and global aspects of the theory. For his thesis, Artin suggested that Tate do the same for Hecke L-series. When Hecke proved that the abelian L-functions of number fields (generalizations of Dirichlet’s L-functions) have an analytic continuation throughout the plane with a functional equation of the expected type, he saw that his methods applied even to a new kind of L-function, now named after him. Once Tate had developed his harmonic analysis of local fields and of the idèle group, he was able prove analytic continuation and functional equations for all the relevant L-series without Hecke’s complicated theta-formulas. Received by the editors September 5, 2016. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 01A75, 11-06, 14-06. c ©2017 American Mathematical Society

The collected works

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

L'article, publie dans Science, sur une des premieres utilisations analytiques de Google Books, fondee sur les n-grammes (Google Ngrams) We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of "culturomics", focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can ...

Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books

Reading comprehension (RC)—in contrast to information retrieval—requires integrating information and reasoning about events, entities, and their relations across a full document. Question answering...

/pdf/the-narrativeqa-reading-comprehension-challenge-1ullr912nm.pdf

The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge

We consider the problem of automatically inferring latent character types in a collection of 15,099 English novels published between 1700 and 1899. Unlike prior work in which character types are assumed responsible for probabilistically generating all text associated with a character, we introduce a model that employs multiple effects to account for the influence of extra-linguistic information (such as author). In an empirical evaluation, we find that this method leads to improved agreement with the preregistered judgments of a literary scholar, complementing the results of alternative models.

/pdf/a-bayesian-mixed-effects-model-of-literary-character-3134hn2sl0.pdf

A Bayesian Mixed Effects Model of Literary Character

We use quantitative methods to analyze a collection of 21,367 scholarly articles in literary studies from 1889–2013. Our approach reveals aspects of our disciplinary history that have been occluded by existing histories’ emphasis on generational and methodological conflict. We demonstrate gradual, unnoted shifts in the themes and vocabularies of scholarship—including the long rise of new subjects (like violence); we show the surprising novelty of central theoretical concepts; and we explore transformations in the shared rationales for literary scholarship that exceed the boundaries of conventional labels like “New Criticism” and “New Historicism.” Though our method uses computational tools, we not claim to provide a definitive or objective perspective on disciplinary history; instead, our approach, like the related methods of content analysis in the social sciences, allows us to pursue nuanced interpretations of the language of many texts at once.

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/49323/QuietTransformations.pdf?sequence=2

The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us

Quantitative methods have been central to the humanities since scholars began relying on full-text search to map archives. But the intellectual implications of search technology are rendered opaque by humanists’ habit of considering algorithms as arbitrary tools. To reflect more philosophically, and creatively, on the hermeneutic options available to us, humanists may need to converse with disciplines that understand algorithms as principled epistemological theories. We need computer science, in other words, not as a source of tools but as a theoretical interlocutor.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/10.1525/rep.2014.127.1.64

Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago

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

Ted Underwood

Papers

A Bayesian Mixed Effects Model of Literary Character

The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us

Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago

The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction

Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change