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.

Clifford Siskin and William Warner, Eds.: This Is Enlightenment

Abstract: Clifford Siskin and William Warner, eds. This Is Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. xii+505. $75.00. Jon Klancher (JK): The collection This Is Enlightenment can be hard to review as a stand-alone book because it also belongs to a series of actions or gatherings, a larger and controversial "event" taking place over the past several years (including at the conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism last year in Vancouver). At one level, this event has been radiating panels, lectures, forums and other academic spinoffs, starting with the conference "Mediating Enlightenment" held at NYU in April 2007. It's no small undertaking, and the Chicago volume (hereafter TIE) is only the most crystallized print form of that wider project. Whatever criticisms I myself have, I want to put them in this light--something is happening around here, and we have a pretty good idea by now what it is. But what to call it? This broader "turn" seems to be crystallizing around 2010, but for several years scholars have been trying to give it a name: a bibliographical turn (Leah Price in PMLA), a digital-humanities turn (Matthew Kirschenbaum in the ADE Journal), a quantitative turn (Jeffrey Williams in The Chronicle of Higher Education). (1) Any of these calls could be justified, but my own choice would be to call it a wider "media turn"--on a scale that rivals the scope of earlier linguistic and cultural turns--and this book speaks to such a turn by gathering scholars notable in literary history, Enlightenment studies, and media archaeology and asking them how to put those fields together, accentuating and even redefining "media" as the historical operator. As I read it, the volume is asking: To what extent was the Enlightenment an event in the history of media? But also: what has kept us from grasping literary and art history before the late 19th century as we grasp mechanized and mass media after the advent of telegraphy, photography, movies, or tv: namely, as media. I think the more amorphous term the editors invoke--"mediations"--is an effort to generalize the question, so the editors, William Warner and Clifford Siskin, claim in the Introduction that "Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation" (1). They may get into difficulties, though, by trying to give "mediations" a definite shape and weight, reducing them to "tools," for example. Alan Bewell (AB): This broader intellectual interest in understanding historically how cultural, literary, and political modes of representation are shaped by the material media through which they were originally communicated or subsequently received is certainly the governing context for this publication, and it is in this area where the book will have its primary impact. In moving towards a discussion of what TIE says about the history of mediation and in assessing to what degree it makes an important contribution to our understanding of how a "media turn" might lead to a transformation in literary and cultural studies, it is perhaps worth stating at the beginning what this book is not: that is, a book about the Enlightenment, or even more broadly, about the mediated reception of the Enlightenment over the past 250 years. The editors promise a book that will use "mediation" to answer the question "What is Enlightenment?" and their answer, that we should read Enlightenment in terms of the forms of media that made it possible, is an exciting one. Unfortunately, despite the degree to which this book focuses on communication (here I am thinking particularly of William Warner's superb essay "Transmitting Liberty," which discusses the role of newspapers and correspondence committees in the formation of an American revolutionary political identity), the editors' idea of what the book is supposed to be about seems not to have been adequately communicated to the contributors. Most, though well known for work in other areas and periods, are not particularly well known as specialists on the Enlightenment. …

The Rise and Fall of Genre Differentiation in English-Language Fiction.

Abstract: The organization of fiction into genres is a relatively recent innovation. We cast new light on the history of this practice by studying the strength of the textual differentiation between genres, and between genre fiction collectively and the rest of the fiction market, in a collection of English-language books stretching from 1860 to 2009. To measure differentiation, we adapt distance measures that have been used to evaluate the strength of clustering. We use genre labels from two different sources: the Library of Congress headings assigned by librarians, and the genre categories implicit in book reviews published by Kirkus Reviews, covering books from 1928 to 2009. Both sources support an account that has genre differentiation rising to (roughly) the middle of the twentieth century, and declining by the end of the century.

Complexities Associated with User-generated Book Reviews in Digital Libraries: Temporal, Cultural, and Political Case Studies

Abstract: While digital libraries (DL) have made large-scale collections of digitized books increasingly available to researchers [31, 67], there remains a dearth of similar data provisions or infrastructure for computational studies of the consumption and reception of books. In the last two decades, user-generated book reviews on social media have opened up unprecedented research possibilities for humanities and social sciences (HSS) scholars who are interested in book reception. However, limitations and gaps have emerged from existing DH research which utilize social media data for answering HSS questions. To shed light on the under-investigated features of user-generated book reviews and the challenges they might pose to scholarly research, we conducted three exemplar cases studies: (1) a longitudinal analysis for profiling the temporal changes of ratings and popularity of 552 books across ten years; (2) a cross-cultural comparison of book ratings of the same 538 books across two platforms; and, (3) a classification experiment on 20,000 sponsored and non-sponsored books reviews. Correspondingly, our research reveals the real-world complexities and under-investigated features of user-generated book reviews in three dimensions: the transience of book ratings and popularity (temporal dimension), the cross-cultural differences in reading interests and book reception (cultural dimension), and the user power dynamics behind the publicly accessible reviews (“political” dimension). Our case studies also demonstrate the challenges posed by user-generated book reviews’ real-world complexities to their scholarly usage and propose solutions to these challenges. We conclude that DL stakeholders and scholars working with user-generated book reviews should look into these under-investigated features and real-world challenges to evaluate and improve the scholarly usability and interpretability of their data. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems $\rightarrow$ Digital libraries and archives;. Applied computing $\rightarrow$ Digital libraries and archives.

Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture

Abstract: : Many aspects of behavior are guided by dispositions that are relatively durable once formed. Political opinions and phonology, for instance, change largely through cohort succession. But evidence for cohort effects has been scarce in artistic and intellectual history; researchers in those fields more commonly explain change as an immediate response to recent innovations and events. We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,830 works of fiction from 1880 to 1999 and find that slightly more than half (54.7 percent) of the variance explained by time is explained better by an author’s year of birth than by a book’s year of publication. Writing practices do change across an author’s career. But the pace of change declines steeply with age. This finding suggests that existing histories of literary culture have a large blind spot: the early experiences that form cohorts are pivotal but leave few traces in the historical record.

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...