• Readings for Next Series of Classes
  • For Thursday
    • Andrew Goldstone et al., Topic model of 40 years of the Signs journal of “Women in Culture and Society” (visualized in Goldstone’s Dfr-browser interface)
      • Helpful in learning how to work with Dfr-browser is the guide page on “Interpreting the topic model of Signs“
    • Andrew Piper, excerpt from “Topoi (Dispersion),” in Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (2019)  — read only pp. 66–75 [available on course Canvas site]
  • For next week (Tuesday):
    • Background Readings in Linguistics Theory
      • Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1959)  – read pp. 114-117, 123-27.
      • J. [John] R. [Rupert] Firth, “A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory, 1930-55” (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957) – read sections III-IV (pp. 7-13) [available on course Canvas site]
    • Due next Tuesday, May 7th: Topic Modeling Exercise

Student proposals

WhatEvery1Says (WE1S) Project, 2017-2021,
https://we1s.ucsb.edu/

Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us” (2014)

Andrew Goldstone, Topic model of 100 years of literary criticism journals (visualized in Goldstone’s Dfr-browser interface)

• Numbers
• Violence & Power
• Criticism & Theory
• Recent topics

In recent years, researchers in computer science have devised exploratory techniques that can identify groups of words with more sensitivity to the discursive context. (360)

The aim of topic modeling is to identify the thematic or rhetorical patterns that inform a collection of documents….
The topics of topic modeling are not simply themes; they might also reflect rhetorical frames, cognitive schemata, or specialized idioms (of the sort that Bakhtin conceived as mixed together in social heteroglossia); if they are capacious enough, topics may even indicate a discourse in Foucault’s sense. (361)

Topics are interestingly slippery objects that require interpretation. Violence might be a reasonable one-word summary of topic 80, but it isn’t a complete description. The most common word in the topic, after all, is power—a somewhat broader concept. The topic also includes strange details, like what appear to be the names of body parts: blood, head, hands, face, and eyes. There is a coherence to this list, but it may not be the kind of coherence we ordinarily associate with the term topic. (363)

Quantitative methods may be especially useful for characterizing long, gradual changes, because change of that sort is otherwise difficult to grasp. But the methods we used in this article don’t prescribe a particular scale of historical analysis; on the contrary, one of their advantages is an ability to reveal overlapping phenomena on different scales, or even transformations of the pace of change itself. (379)