Class 10 (English 197 – Winter 2025)

Class Business

Readings for Thursday (Feb. 13)

Discussion of Topic Modeling (continued)

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

Figures 1-2 in Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us” (2014)
Figures 1-2

Figure 4 in Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us” (2014)
Figure 4

Figure 5 in Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us” (2014)
Figure 5

Figure 7 in Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us” (2014)
Figure 7

Manicule 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)

Mysteries of Topic Modeling — What’s a “Topic”?

From Goldstone & Underwood,
“The Quiet Transformations”

The aim of topic modeling is to identify the thematic or rhetorical patterns that inform a collection of documents….
1-px transparent spacerThe 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)

From Andrew Piper,
Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (2019)

And yet, despite the growing body of work on topic models, no one has stopped to ask the question “What is a topic?,” either in the classical rhetorical sense or in the computational one. If we have this new way of deriving semantic significance from texts at a large scale, how does it fit within the longer philosophical and philological traditions of understanding “topics”?  (67)

What’s a “topic”?

Two pages of Alan LIu's print copy of Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 498 novel showing examples of hand annotation (horizontal underlining and vertical lining or bracketing of passages) accompanied by such topic labels for themes of interest. (The labels on this page are "God," "Revelation," and "Drugs.")
Two pages of a Alan LIu’s print copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 498 novel showing examples of hand annotation (horizontal underlining and vertical lining or bracketing of passages) accompanied by such topic labels for themes of interest. (The labels on this page are “God,” “Revelation,” and “Drugs.”)

Back pages of Alan Liu's print copy of Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 novel showing labeled topics or themes with page numbers of associated passages in the novel.
Back pages of Alan Liu’s print copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 novel showing labeled topics or themes with page numbers of associated passages in the novel.

Commonplace Books

XX

From Zettelkasten to “Qualitative Content Analysis”

Example of qualitative coding of an article in Atlas.ti, showing a passage from Steven Brint et al's article of 2005 titled "From the Liberal to the Practical Arts in American Colleges and Universities" and codes for passages related to "professionaliztion of higher ed," "American higher ed system," "secondary ed," "citizenship," and "market forces."
Example of qualitative coding of an article in Atlas.ti, showing a passage from Steven Brint et al’s article of 2005 titled “From the Liberal to the Practical Arts in American Colleges and Universities” and codes for passages related to “professionaliztion of higher ed,” “American higher ed system,” “secondary ed,” “citizenship,” and “market forces.”

Probability?

Topic models, probabilistic thought, and the humanities (slide deck by Alan Liu)
Topic models, probabilistic thought, and the humanities (slide deck by Alan Liu)

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