HUNDREDS, THOUSANDS OR MILLIONS OF WORDS: FITTING OUR METHODS TO THE QUESTION - Nov. 4

When: Friday, November 4, 12-1 pm
Where: The Lew Forum, Peter A. Allard School of Law, UBC, 1822 East Mall 

Speaker: Ted Underwood, Professor of English and Information Sciences, University of Illinois

Many humanists rarely used numbers before discovering algorithms (like topic modeling) that are suited to exploring enormous libraries. As a result, their conversations about method tend to be organized by a strong opposition between “close” and “distant” approaches, aimed at radically different scales. But interesting things can be done at every scale of analysis, from a single passage, to dozens or hundreds of texts, to millions of volumes. In this lecture, Ted Underwood will briefly survey that range of scales before dwelling on some approaches suited to the middle of the spectrum. Here scholars rarely have open-ended exploratory goals. Instead they begin with a loosely formulated theme, traced in a few examples, and need a way to scale up the question. In a situation like this, it can be valuable to keep human readers in the loop: we are, after all, very good at reading with a specific end in view. But algorithmic models also have unique strengths, catching certain kinds of patterns we would miss. The lecture will describe ways of pairing human expertise with algorithmic flexibility to address questions about genre, gender and the representation of time in fiction. Ted Underwood is author of The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Political Economy (2005) and Why Literary Periods Mattered (2013). His next book will be entitled The Horizon of Literary History.