Ted Underwood

Bio: Ted Underwood is an academic researcher from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The author has contributed to research in topics: Literary criticism & Literary science. The author has an hindex of 13, co-authored 45 publications receiving 671 citations. Previous affiliations of Ted Underwood include Colby College & Urbana University.

How Quickly Do Literary Standards Change

Abstract: It's hard to generalize meaningfully about the standards that govern literary reception, and even harder to describe how they change. This article tries to get some leverage on this difficult problem by contrasting two different samples of poetry: one group of 360 volumes that was reviewed in prestigious venues between 1820 and 1919, and another that was selected randomly from HathiTrust Digital Library. We train a model to predict reception using only word frequencies from these volumes, and then use that model to draw inferences about the pace and direction of literary change. For instance, how are diachronic changes related to synchronic standards of prestige? The collections of data and metadata that underpin this argument were made possible through grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the funding agencies. Code, data, and metadata are available at the github repo below.

Critical Response II. The Theoretical Divide Driving Debates about Computation

Abstract: Quantitative literary research has a history stretching back to the early twentieth century and has attracted criticism for almost as long. But most critics of the project have argued, along with Stanley Fish, that numbers are useless because they fail to produce humanistic meaning. By contrast, Nan Z. Da’s “Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies” takes its stand inside the world of numbers in order to argue that mathematical approaches to literature must fail on mathematical grounds (see Nan Z. Da, “Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies,” Critical Inquiry 45 [Spring 2019]: 601–39). Internal critiques can sometimes bridge the gap between hardened positions, and Da deserves credit for trying to produce one. But it appears that critics of computation disagree with practitioners even about math. An online forum shortly after the article’s publication included eight scholars, including several who had escaped Da’s criticism. Of that group, only one (whose work doesn’t emphasize computation) was persuaded by Da’s quantitative argument.

The collected works

Abstract: 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

Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books

Abstract: 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 ...

The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge

Abstract: 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...