Monthly Archives: November 2018

New Issue, Representations 144

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NOW AVAILABLE

Number 144, Fall 2018

WHITNEY DAVIS 
“Reading-In”: Franz Boas’s Theory of the Beholder’s Share

ROGER MATHEW GRANT 
Music Lessons on Affect and Its Objects

EWAN JONES
Thermodynamic Rhythm: The Poetics of Waste

JULIÁN JIMÉNEZ HEFFERNAN 
The Stamp of Rarity: Ancestrality and Extinction in Daniel Deronda

KATHRYN L. BRACKNEY 
Remembering “Planet Auschwitz” During the Cold War

Plus:

FIELD NOTES 
Robert H. Sharf: What Do Nanquan and Schrödinger Have Against Cats?

Upcoming in Representations 145, a special issue, Visual History: The Past in Pictures, edited by Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa R. Schwartz: Billie Melman on the archaeological site of Ur between the two world wars, Randall Meissen on Francisco Pacheco’s Book of True Portraits, Evonne Levy on eyewitness accounts and the Renaissance media revolution, Allan Doyle on Géricault and the production of visual history, and Aaron Rich on role of the Hollywood “research bible” in creating cinematic recreations of the past. With an introduction by the editors. (Coming in February.)

Diciplinarity and Hoaxes

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Michael Clune weighs in on

The Bizarro World of Literary Studies

in the Chronicle of Higher Education, posted on October 26:

The crumbling of disciplinary boundaries wasn’t simply visited on literature departments from above. The rot began within. Progressive humanists like myself have largely ignored this history, for fear of giving more ammo to the corporatizing goons. But unless we get honest about our past, our impassioned defense of our disciplines will conceal a hollow core. If our case rests on the suppression of the evidence against us, it will shatter with each new blow.

Michael Clune is professor of English at Case Western Reserve University and writer of creative nonfiction. His essay Orwell and the Obvious appeared in Representations 107.

Data and Literature

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Modeling Perspective and Parallax to Tell the Story of Genre Fiction
Ted Underwood
Thursday, November 8th, 2018
5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall (Geballe Room), UC Berkeley

In this talk Ted Underwood will use science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and the Gothic to explore the advantages of an approach that asks data science to contribute to the humanities by adding perspectival flexibility, rather than sheer scale. Underwood trained predictive models of these genres using ground truth drawn from various sources and periods (19c reviewers, early 20c bibliographies, contemporary librarians), in order to explore how implicit assumptions about genre consolidate or change across time.

Ted Underwood teaches in the School of Information Sciences and the English Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was trained as a Romanticist and now applies machine learning to large digital collections. His most recent book, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (University of Chicago, Spring 2019) addresses new perspectives opened up by large digital libraries. Underwood’s contributions to Representations include Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago and Stories of Parallel Lives and the Status Anxieties of Contemporary Historicism.