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 Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate.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...

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The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge

Text‐Mining the Humanities

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016

The Science in Shelley’s Theory of Poetry

S cale, from the Latin scala (ladder) via Old French escaler (climb), refers to valuation (“a graduated range of values forming a standard system for measuring or grading”) as well as to dimensionality (“the relative size or extent of something”) (Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 12th ed., 1282).We have assembled this special issue ofMLQ to highlight important new work of literary-historical inquiry, partly though not exclusively pertaining to the digital humanities, in which problems arising from the nexus of scale and value have become conspicuous concerns of method. In doing so, we are not implying that our discipline’s current perturbation over these problems is without precedent. Every field of study must, at every stage in its development, define its proper scope, locating workable boundaries between its own objects, zones, and tools of research and those external to it. To engage in literary studies has always meant operating in a specially constructed and privileged space of the “literary,” a field of practice scaled to incorporate everything relevant to an understanding of literature, while redlining adjacent neighborhoods as precincts of extraor subliterary concern, subject to the authority of other disciplines. Within this discipline-shaped space, we rely on a host of other scalar constructs. Certain temporal spans (century, literary period, artistic generation), geocultural categories (national literature, regional literature, diasporic or exilic literature), formal entities (protagonist, genre, individual work), and so forth supply us with the basic units we need to organize our research projects and structure our intellectual and institutional divisions of labor. The degree of prestige attaching to these built units of study is hierarchized, such that some national literatures,

Ted Underwood

Papers

Text‐Mining the Humanities

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016

The Science in Shelley’s Theory of Poetry

Shifting Scales Between Literature and Social Science

Understanding Genre in a Collection of a Million Volumes