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Reading Modernism with Machines Digital Humanities and Modernist Literature (Shawna Ross, James OSullivan (eds.))

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Matheus Puppe

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Here is a summary of the introduction to the book “Reading Modernism with Machines: Digital Humanities and Modernist Literature”:

  • The book consists of essays that use computational methods and digital tools to analyze and interpret modernist literature. It aims to show how digital techniques can assist and supplement existing literary criticism rather than replace traditional methods.

  • The editors hope the collection represents what digital literary studies should be - using computers to discover new evidence that furthers existing arguments and opens up new avenues of inquiry, with the methods serving literary and humanistic disciplines rather than being an end in themselves.

  • While digital humanities brings interdisciplinary collaboration, the book focuses specifically on modernist literature with contributions from scholars in the humanities applying computational methods to their fields.

  • It provides an example of disciplinary focus within digital humanities through modernist literature, demonstrating how digital tools can make existing modernist scholarship “new” rather than rendering it obsolete.

  • In summary, the introduction sets up the goal of the book to illustrate productive intersections between traditional literary analysis and computational techniques within the specific context of modernist studies.

Here is a summary of the key points in the provided text about 20th century American literature:

  • The text provides biographies of 13 academics who research various topics related to modernism, digital humanities, American literature, and Renaissance literature.

  • The contributors come from universities in Canada, the US, and the UK. They hold positions ranging from graduate students to professors.

  • Their areas of research expertise include modernist literary networks, feminist studies, digital humanities tools and methods, computational text analysis, Renaissance literature and its intersection with law, Shakespeare, Spenser, and more.

  • Specific projects and publications mentioned include work on magazine cultures in Canada, geotemporal expression, digital pedagogy, ambivalence in political texts, and network visualization of feminist reformers.

  • The contributors represent a variety of disciplinary approaches including English, computer science, and comparative literature that relate to the study and digital exploration of 20th century American and other Modernist literatures.

  • The introduction explains how digital humanities projects that use computational tools and methods to analyze modernist literature are effectively “reading modernism with machines.” The machines we use shape what we can know and understand about modernism in important ways.

  • There is a danger of too closely equating modernists’ perspectives on technology with our own perspectives today. DH projects must reflect carefully on how their methods influence interpretations of modernist texts and the period.

  • Some approaches in DH like critical code studies, minimal computing, and the work of thinkers like Johanna Drucker and Alan Liu model the kind of reflexivity needed. They emphasize considering how digital methods affect cultural understanding.

  • While modernist critiques of technology resonated with 20th century ideas, we cannot simply transpose those ideas onto our current situation. Technological contexts have changed, as have social understandings of things like class divides related to technology mastery.

  • In summary, DH projects on modernism must thoughtfully consider how the computational tools and methods they use shape what emerges as knowable about modernism, to avoid anachronistically imposing contemporary perspectives. Reflexivity is needed to mitigate this risk.

The passage discusses the need for field-specific digital humanities work that is grounded in existing literary/disciplinary conversations and criticisms, rather than positioning technology as the primary focus. It argues that when digital humanities scholars draw parallels between historical periods like modernism and contemporary digital culture, these parallels need to be carefully qualified and contextualized. Simply pointing out surface-level resemblances is not sufficient.

The passage also cautions against an uncritical embrace of technology that risks fetishizing or naturalizing it, as some modernist movements did. A properly modernist digital humanities should avoid extrapolating the human toward technology or vice versa. It should critically interrogate the relationships between humans, technology, and knowledge production over time.

To do field-specific work, the passage suggests engaging deeply with ongoing debates within individual literary fields, addressing issues like canon, aesthetics and media changes. The goal is for digital humanities to contribute new literary and critical insights, not just technical experiments. Building connections across DH and traditional scholarship in specific fields is emphasized over platform-focused approaches.

Here is a summary of the introduction without oversimplifying:

The introduction discusses Reading Modernism with Machines, an edited collection that uses digital humanities (DH) methods to analyze modernist literature. It provides context for applying computational approaches specifically to modernism, building on 20+ years of digital modernist archives and projects.

The chapters employ discipline-specific DH approaches like cultural studies, corpus linguistics, mapping, and network analysis. Several advance feminist and postcolonial perspectives. They combine close and distant reading, testing how DH can both expand the modernist canon and critique its own quantitative methods.

The introduction outlines each chapter’s unique contribution: analyzing 20th century laboratories as sites of modernist creation; combining close reading with big data to model dialogism; spatial analysis of modernist novels; visualizing feminist networks and scholarship; examining remediation across media; stylometry of a neglected poet’s career development; and computational analysis of poetic diction.

Taken together, the essays serve as a barometer for the future of modernist DH, from reconsidering the canon to developing new methodologies around topics like globalization, book history, and new media studies. The collection aims to both take stock of digital modernism so far and project new avenues for research.

  • The chapter analyzes modernist scholars’ generalizations about Georgian poetry and how it differs from Victorian poetry and high modernist poetry. Through computational analysis, some of these generalizations are confirmed while others are disconfirmed.

  • The results provide new insights into high modernism and should inform readings of Eliot’s criticism, especially “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “The Metaphysical Poets.”

  • Chapter 9 uses macro-etymological analysis to shed new light on James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It finds new facets of Stephen’s religion, sexuality and politics by examining changing proportions of word origins in the text.

  • Chapter 10 applies sentiment analysis and develops a “bodily lexicon” from Ulysses to interpret passages hinted at by the algorithm. This yields a theory of Bloom’s centrality and a comparison of modernist and Victorian affect styles.

  • Chapter 11 discusses difficulties encoding Mina Loy’s typographically innovative poems and uses this to examine modernist feminism, concepts of the machine in Marx and Turing, and the need for a more feminist markup language.

  • Chapter 12 critiques how modern philosophies still underlie CGI analysis and adapts modernist methods to reveal colonial tropes in how CGI composites and edits human bodies on screen.

So in summary, the chapters apply computational and digital methods to illuminate modernist literature and shed new light on modernist concepts and debates.

Here is a summary of the key points from the chapter:

  • The chapter discusses the emergence of laboratories and experimental spaces where modernist artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, scientists, engineers, and other fields collaborated in the early 20th century in both Europe and North America. These “laboratory modernisms” brought together different disciplines.

  • It focuses on key examples like Hugo Munsterberg’s psychology lab at Harvard in the 1890s, Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York, and Bauhaus and Vkhutemas in Russia/Germany in the 1920s-1930s which fostered new modes of interdisciplinary collaboration.

  • These modernist labs served as critiques of scientific and corporate models of research through their ideological or aesthetic reformations.

  • The chapter then discusses how digital humanities and new media labs of the late 20th/early 21st century modeled themselves after these early modernist laboratories, bringing together different fields again through collaborative methodologies and tools.

  • Key examples discussed are the Speculative Computing Lab, Stanford Literary Lab, Harvard Cultural Observatory, and Modernist Journals Project Lab.

  • It examines the intersection between modernist art production under laboratory conditions and digital humanities work experimenting with digitized modernist materials in lab settings.

The passage discusses several early 20th century figures who conceptualized and established aesthetic laboratories and experimental spaces that bridged art, science, technology and industry. Hugo Münsterberg established laboratories at Harvard that investigated psychological mechanisms in art and early film. Alfred Stieglitz founded the 291 gallery in New York in 1908, which he described as an “aesthetic laboratory” that exhibited diverse media in an interdisciplinary environment. The Soviet constructivists established laboratories like VKhUTEMAS and Inkhuk that conducted research on producing functional, non-individualistic art aligned with Bolshevik ideals. Roger Fry theorized an “Omega Workshops” laboratory for design experimentation in London from 1913-1919. The Bauhaus in Germany from 1919-1933 operated workshops as “laboratories” for developing mass-producible designs through collaboration between art, craft and industry. Many Bauhaus figures later established new laboratories abroad, like Moholy-Nagy founding the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937.

  • The Bauhaus school in Germany pioneered ideas of industrial design, minimal aesthetics, and integrating art and craft that influenced later institutions. Alfred Barr brought Bauhaus principles to MoMA’s displays and exhibitions.

  • In the 1930s, institutions like MoMA, the Design Laboratory, and art schools began experimenting more with hands-on workshops and interactive exhibits that invited public participation, emulating the classroom environment of the Bauhaus.

  • Surrealist groups in Paris and London conducted experiments with automatic writing, psychical phenomena, and recording everyday life that blurred the lines between art and science. Mass Observation in the UK employed scientific methods and collaborative research teams to document everyday culture.

  • Modernist writers like Stein were influenced by their experiences in psychological laboratories. Her early automatic writing experiments informed her unique prose styles. Literary critics now use digital tools and computational methods to analyze modernist works influenced by scientific laboratories.

  • The chapter discusses how laboratories, collaboratories, and observatories served as institutional models for interdisciplinary avant-garde experiments blurring boundaries between art, science, and public participation in the early 20th century.

Here is a summary of the provided text:

  • The text discusses how an ethnography of a neuroendocrinology lab documented the lab taking on characteristics of a “system of literary inscription.” This disturbed lab members who saw it as representing their work in a literary rather than scientific way.

  • This led to examining if the humanities could be viewed as a type of laboratory experiment. Amy Earhart’s study of digital humanities collaboration cautiously suggested differentiating it from inter/intradisciplinarity.

  • While digital humanities doesn’t fully adopt the science lab model, labs need similar infrastructure support. Funding models have developed to capitalize on digital economies and support labs.

  • Labs are described as extradisciplinary, working outside disciplines collaboratively, and paradisciplinary, occupying interstitial spaces between disciplines through comparison and dialogue.

  • The history of modernist labs like Experiments in Art and Technology and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT are discussed. These served as pre-digital collaboratories facilitating artist-engineer collaboration.

  • Key figures like Robert Rauschenberg, Billy Klüver, Gyorgy Kepes, and Muriel Cooper who helped establish these labs and their blending of art, science and technology are outlined.

  • The passage discusses the evolution of design-centered interdisciplinary labs and workshops from the Bauhaus era to modern digital humanities labs.

  • It focuses on the work of design pioneer Anne Burdick, who emphasized process over products in her design approach. She saw the Bauhaus as pioneering interdisciplinarity between art and design.

  • Burdick went on to establish labs like the Visible Language Workshop that implemented Bauhaus pedagogical approaches. She later helped merge this lab with MIT’s new Media Lab under Nicholas Negroponte.

  • The passage discusses how the Media Lab positioned itself as continuing the avant-garde, interdisciplinary spirit of the Bauhaus. It cites Negroponte drawing comparisons to the Bauhaus and characterizing the lab as a “Salon des Refusés.”

  • It also discusses later digital humanities labs like the Speculative Computing Lab and Stanford Literary Lab that drew inspiration from modernist experimental approaches while employing digital tools and large datasets.

Here are the key differences between the Stanford Literary Lab and the Harvard Cultural Observatory/Google Labs:

  • Paradigm/approach: The Stanford Lab takes a more humanistic approach grounded in close reading and interpretation, while the Harvard Observatory/Google Labs come from a more scientific paradigm focused on large-scale data analysis and visualization.

  • Definition of culture: The Stanford Lab criticizes the Harvard Observatory for not defining “culture” and questions whether the Google Books corpus truly represents culture.

  • Representativeness of data: The Stanford Lab argues the Google Books corpus is not fully representative of culture since it excludes things like newspapers, magazines, ephemeral materials.

  • Conceptualization of cultural analysis: The Stanford Lab is skeptical of calling the Harvard Observatory’s analyses “representations of culture.” The modes of interpretation differ based on different analytic concepts like the concept of “culturomics.”

  • Institutional affiliation: The Stanford Lab is based in a humanities department, while the Harvard Observatory and Google Labs come more from a scientific institutional context.

So in summary, the key differentiator is that the Stanford Lab takes a more humanistic, interpretive approach grounded in close reading, whereas the Harvard/Google models come from a more data-driven, scientifically-oriented paradigm focused on large-scale computational analysis and visualization.

  • The Modernist Journals Project (MJP) website initially provided instructions on how to read printed magazines but not on how to search their digital archive.

  • The MJP Lab was created as a supplement to reorient the pedagogy toward digital reading practices like database searching and visualization.

  • The Lab makes datasets available like magazine text transcriptions, metadata records, and plain text files to facilitate computational analysis and visualization projects.

  • Markup languages like TEI and metadata standards like MODS implement modular structures when encoding magazines digitally. However, this can pose obstacles for recreating the non-linear, ergodic reading experience of printed magazines.

  • The creation of the MJP Lab helped realize the vision of collaborative “humanities labs” where networks of researchers contribute specialized skills to analyze large cultural objects like periodical archives.

  • Latour and Woolgar documented science labs closely in their book Laboratory Life. However, they may have overlooked even closer models - the mobile collapsible labs used by historical avant-garde groups.

  • These avant-garde labs and their periodical extensions could be seen as sites of experimental reading and inscription, related to modular designs in publications and early digital visualizations.

  • Prior models for collaborative digital humanities research more closely resemble traditional science labs, with start-up funding, shared equipment, and work to secure continued external funding.

  • “Collaboratories” aiming to facilitate long-distance collaboration across institutions sought to apply IT to better support scientific collaboration, as seen with projects linking Bell Labs researchers with artists in the 1960s-70s.

  • Overall there were opportunities for digital humanities to look to closer historical models of avant-garde and inter-institutional collaborative labs and publications, rather than only traditional internal science lab models.

  • Matthew Jockers claims in Macroanalysis that the advent of computational “distant reading” will make close reading obsolete as a method for investigating literary history. He argues massive digital literary corpora allow for “investigations at a scale that reaches […] a point of being comprehensive.”

  • Jockers argues close reading is inadequate because it relies on “partial sample” readings, whereas distant reading allows analyzing entire corpuses without sampling.

  • However, the authors argue close and distant reading are actually complementary rather than competing methods. Close reading remains important for grounding distant readings and investigating specific textual features that shape meaning.

  • They present a methodology called “close reading with big data” that integrates close reading techniques with computational analysis of large text collections. This allows leveraging the strengths of both approaches.

  • As a case study, they apply this methodology to analyze dialogism in Modernist works by investigating characteristic linguistic features with both close readings and quantitative analysis of large digitized corpuses.

  • This demonstrates how computational methods can scale up interpretations from close readings, but close reading is still needed to understand situated literary meanings and hypotheses generated through distant reading. The two approaches are mutually reinforcing.

The passage discusses different perspectives on the relationship between close reading and distant/computational reading approaches in literary analysis. It makes the following key points:

  • Early proponents of computational analysis stopped short of claiming it could replace close reading entirely. They saw it as a complement or extension.

  • Projects that combined computational analysis with single texts found it enriched close readings, but larger-scale “distant reading” approaches often failed to provide genuine insights.

  • Critics like Jockers went too far in calling close reading “totally inappropriate,” though he later walked this back.

  • The passage cites Erich Auerbach who argued computational approaches must begin from concrete phenomena identified through close reading, to avoid abstract theorizing.

  • The chapter then describes two projects that aim to bridge close and distant reading by using computational stylistics to model dialogism in modernist texts, in keeping with theorists like Bakhtin and Auerbach. The goal is reciprocal insight between computational and human analysis.

  • Bakhtin argued in favor of the novel over poetry, especially lyric poetry, while in exile in Kazakhstan in the 1930s under Soviet totalitarian rule.

  • He saw the novel as presenting a model of pluralist, democratic society through its multi-voiced and open-ended form, in contrast to poetry which he saw as single-voiced.

  • Bakhtin’s ideal novelist renders everyday dialects without purifying or ordering them, preserving “heteroglossia” (language characteristics and intentions of others).

  • Poets, by contrast, purge language of these elements to impose a single standardized pattern, destroying plurality.

  • Eliot’s modernist poem The Waste Land also uses multiple voices, though without marking transitions. It bridges lyric and dramatic forms as Eliot sought to abandon lyric for drama.

  • The project examines The Waste Land computationally to identify voice switches and segment speakers, tracking changes in style across the text. It aims to model the dialogism emphasized by Bakhtin and other modernist theorists.

The researchers developed a method to identify potential shifts in voice or style in T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem “The Waste Land” by analyzing features in windows of text on either side of each word. They tested their method on artificially constructed poems and found that LSA (latent semantic analysis) and formality features slightly outperformed surface features.

When applying their method to versions of “The Waste Land”, they found that many of the stylistic shifts identified by the algorithm coincided with those identified by human analysis. However, in some cases the algorithm identified shifts in different locations that offered new insightful interpretations upon further inspection.

The researchers then used their model’s output to develop six-dimensional stylistic profiles of individual characters based on features like objectivity, abstractness, literariness, colloquialness, concreteness and subjectivity. These profiles captured the distinct speech styles of characters as identified by human readers. Overall, the study demonstrated how computational analysis trained on large datasets can meaningfully contribute to and prompt new directions in close reading of modernist works.

The study used computational analysis to analyze stylistic profiles of different characters in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. It found that the profiles accurately distinguished the voices of different characters and conformed to qualitative expectations about each character.

For example, the profile of the primary female character Marie was marked by high subjectivity and high colloquialness, reflecting her emotional and nostalgic voice. Meanwhile, the narrator Tiresias was marked by relatively low colloquialness and high objectivity/literariness.

In some cases, divergent stylistic profiles for passages attributed to the same character prompted a reexamination. For example, passages attributed to Tiresias had very different profiles, but upon reanalysis this was found to reflect the chameleon-like adaptation of his style to different scenes.

Overall, the profiling approach validated many of the researchers’ qualitative interpretations and clustering of voices in the poem. It also raised some questions, like whether Eliot’s representation of female voices was more stereotyped compared to males. The study concluded the approach was promising for literary analysis and prompted applying it to other modernist works.

Here is a summary of the principal interpretive dilemma highlighted in the passage:

The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf poses a vexed question of who is speaking at any given point. Woolf uses free indirect discourse (FID) pervasively in a complicated, multi-voiced way. To analyze this, students were asked to annotate passages from the novel, indicating for each instance of character speech whether it was direct, indirect or free indirect discourse; spoken aloud or silently; and which character was speaking. Because multiple interpretations are often valid, passages were assigned to multiple students.

This encoding exercise aimed to have students clarify their own reading by requiring them to make implicit interpretations explicit. The goal was then to combine these annotations into a digital “reader’s map” showing the range of possible interpretations, thus visualizing the dialogic nature of the novel and reader responses to it. However, inter-annotator agreement was low due to the complexity of Woolf’s use of FID.

In summary, the key interpretive dilemma highlighted is determining who is speaking at any given point in the novel, as Woolf frequently uses free indirect discourse in an intricate, multi-voiced way that allows for multiple valid interpretations. The annotation exercise aimed to surface these different readings.

  • The study uses computational techniques trained on large datasets to analyze stylistic dimensions of three modernist works: The Waste Land, To the Lighthouse, and “The Dead.”

  • It generates “stylistic profiles” that quantify characteristics like objectivity, abstraction, literacy, colloquialism, concreteness, and subjectivity for different characters, social groups, and texts.

  • For To the Lighthouse, it finds conventional power dynamics at play based on class, age, and gender, though female characters are depicted as more objective and abstract than male characters.

  • This raises questions about whether Woolf accurately portrayed social groups or introduced her own biases. The data can prompt discussion but not definitively answer these questions.

  • Going forward, the researchers plan to apply these techniques to more texts to analyze dialogism across literary history and examine questions at a larger scale, such as how stylistic diversity relates to periods of political change.

  • They view computational analysis as part of the hermeneutic circle, where distant and close reading are complementary. Big data can refine interpretations but not replace close reading.

This summary provides an overview of the article “Mapping Modernism’s Z-axis: A Model for Spatial Analysis in Modernist Studies” by Alex Christie and Katie Tanigawa.

Some key points:

  • The article argues that spatial analysis is an important but overlooked consideration for studying modernist texts, in contrast to the traditional focus on temporality in modernist studies influenced by Frederic Jameson.

  • It discusses Andrew Thacker’s view that analyzing modernist works involves considering their interactions with space and geography.

  • The article proposes a model for spatial analysis of modernism that considers the “z-axis” or dimension of vertical space, in addition to horizontal/geographic space. It argues modernist texts often depict or are concerned with vertical spaces like elevators, architectural structures, aerial views.

  • As an example, it analyzes depictions of vertical space and aerial views in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

  • The goal is to develop spatial analysis as an approach that can provide new insights into modernist literature and spatialize some of modernism’s core concerns like fragmentation, temporality, subjectivity.

So in summary, it outlines a framework for considering the overlooked dimension of spatial and vertical space in the study of modernist literature.

  • The chapter discusses a methodology called “z-axis research” for digitally mapping and analyzing representations of space in modernist texts.

  • Z-axis research overlays a digital map of a city contemporary to the modernist text onto textual descriptions of locations within that city. It warps the map based on how much text is devoted to different locations, revealing how the text rewrites the geography.

  • The chapter uses z-axis mapping to analyze Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and Jean Rhys’ Quartet, focusing on their representations of marginalized experiences in interwar Paris.

  • The maps are overlaid onto a 1932 tourist map of Paris, showing how the novels contest the commercialized, monument-focused depiction of the city in the map.

  • Z-axis mapping connects literary and historical spatial representations to geographic theories of how maps encode politics and social hierarchies. It provides a new way to interpret modernist literature’s engagement with urban space.

The passage discusses a methodology for spatially analyzing modernist literature through digital mapping techniques. It aims to visualize subjective and constructed representations of space in modernist texts, rather than normalize space through spatial exclusion.

The methodology involves annotating texts with XML markup to identify locations, then processing that data to generate ratio figures representing how much of each text is set in different locations. These ratios are then used to warp and displace a historical map of Paris into a 3D model, reflecting the “geography” of the literature through topological distortions of the map.

The goal is to represent the “peaks and valleys” of how locations are portrayed in the texts, challenging notions of space as a single essential entity. Markup requires decisions around defining ambiguous locations and narrative movement. Mapping produces 3D landscapes expressing the multiple spatial narratives within and about communities represented in modernist works.

The methodology is meant to critique how modernist texts imagine and represent space, going beyond just producing maps to beginning deeper spatial analysis. It aims to visualize subjective experience and challenge spatial normalization through these modernist experiments in reimagining urban geography digitally.

The article analyzes Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood using a technique called “z-axis mapping” to interpret how space and geography construct queer identity in the text. Barnes depicts a marginalized “queer Paris” lived by characters like the queer doctor.

Public spaces like cafes and streets allow the doctor to anonymously assemble an alternative “Doctor’s city” in the Latin Quarter that expresses his queer identity, in contrast to privileged characters tied to owned spaces and territories. The warped z-axis map of the novel’s Paris visually divides the city along class and sexual lines, with the Left Bank cumulatively warped to represent unstable queer encounters vs. the flatter Right Bank denoting isolated heteronormative episodes.

This reveals how Barnes uses defamiliarized descriptions of ambiguous spaces on the Left Bank to enable coded expressions of queer desire. Rather than indicating real locations, the indeterminacy and lack of ownership of these public spaces are what facilitate queerness. The map cautions against taking it as a factual geography and instead sees warped spaces as zones of possibility critical to queer experience in Barnes’ work and interwar Paris more broadly.

The passage discusses how encoding geographic references in Jean Rhys’s novel Quartet does not primarily serve to identify real-world places mentioned, but rather facilitates a hermeneutic analysis that reads place itself as a coded mode of narrative expression.

For example, the garden at Nora’s house in Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood is seen as a coded reference to the lesbian social scene at Natalie Barney’s salon in Paris. Identifying scenes set in Nora’s garden helps decode Barnes’ writing rather than simply pinpoint real locations.

Mapping Barnes’ novel in XML facilitates a process of decoding these geographic codes, which expose space as an expressive medium used to disclose characters’ identities. Journeys through Paris function not just as travel narratives but as events where sexual dynamics play out across the encoded landscape.

The carriage ride scene illustrates this, as Barnes and the doctor provide differing spatial accounts that reflect diverse articulations of queer desire. Barnes’ account entangles class and lesbian desire, while the doctor avoids such entanglements.

For Jean Rhys’ novel Quartet, mapping it reveals how the narrative privileges marginalized areas rather than monuments, and shows how the depicted geography changes to reflect the protagonist Marya’s deteriorating mental state. It presents Paris as a gendered and classed prison for Marya, contrasting the idea that she constructs it as a “feminine city.”

So in summary, the passage discusses how spatial analysis can uncover modernist novelists’ use of geography and place as coded modes of expression tied to characters’ identities and queer experiences, rather than simply identifying real-world settings.

  • The passage discusses how Jean Rhys constructs a “feminine city” in her novel Quartet that undermines Le Corbusier’s “masculine cityscape” of ordered streets and geometry.

  • Specifically, Rhys does not provide an accurate or fixed mapping of Paris streets but rather shapes the city through her character Marya’s subjective experiences wandering the city.

  • This makes Quartet difficult to precisely map as the narrative lacks order and fixity. Marya’s movements along streets like Boulevard Saint Michel are vague.

  • Deborah Parsons’ analysis connects how Rhys internalizes the streets into the psyche of her characters. For Quartet, this means Marya’s psyche shapes the city and the city shapes her fragmented state of mind.

  • A z-axis map of Marya’s narrative engagement shows it clustered around Montmartre initially where she was happy, but descends to the Left Bank as her life deteriorates.

  • Most of the narrative takes place by the Place Denfert-Rochereau, which was originally called “Place d’Enfer” - place of hell, reflecting Marya’s descent into despair after her husband’s arrest.

  • The map and narrative spend time in prisons, reflecting Marya’s gendered entrapment in the city. Ultimately, Paris becomes her prison while male characters escape.

  • Through spatial analysis, a new feminine version of Paris emerges that contrasts popular images and official maps, constituted by poverty and exclusion for women.

  • The 1907 “Mud March” in London was a pivotal moment that marked the emergence of large-scale feminist demonstrations in Britain. It brought together approximately 3,000 participants from diverse feminist groups to advocate for women’s suffrage.

  • A promotional flyer for the event documents the political divisions but also points of contact within the feminist movement at the time. It lists the leaders of the march who represented various generations, political parties, and feminist organizations.

  • These women’s feminist activities extended beyond suffrage politics into literary and cultural networks, as indicated by primary sources and scholarship. Their convergence at the Mud March showed how the movement was bringing together women from different backgrounds to advance the issue of female suffrage.

  • The flyer suggests the feminist activism of the period was characterized not only by political divisions but also efforts at outreach and cooperation between groups on certain issues. It was a moment where members of diverse feminist communities aligned to promote their work on women’s suffrage.

  • Ettie Fawcett and Jane Strachey helped found Newnham College at Cambridge University, one of the first women’s colleges, which opened in 1871. Virginia Woolf would later fictionalize the college in her book A Room of One’s Own.

  • Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper were pacifists who went to Dublin in 1916 to support the Easter Rising rebels, including Gore-Booth’s sister Constance Markievicz. That year, Gore-Booth also edited the first issue of Urania, a magazine exploring identities beyond the gender binary.

  • W.B. Yeats knew the Gore-Booth family and wrote the poem “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz” reflecting on the sisters’ personal lives and political beliefs.

  • The “Mud March” flyer documented feminist groups coming together around the issue of women’s suffrage and stimulating new public views. Writings about speakers at the march suggest feminism’s influence within modernist networks.

  • The chapter aims to use graphs from the Orlando database and visualization tool to analyze the connections and relationships formed within feminist institutions of the period and advance understandings of feminist modernism. It argues this digital approach can offer new insights.

The passage discusses using the Orlando textbase and visualization tool to investigate two feminist institutions, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and Newnham College, and their connections to modernist literature and culture.

For the NUWSS case study, an initial broad search generated a graph connecting NUWSS members to other women writers based on biographical and textual tags in Orlando. Though some in the graph were not NUWSS members, they were included due to connections to members. Closer analysis of the graph and textbase entries revealed the diversity of perspectives represented, from members to opponents of NUWSS tactics. The graph demonstrated how the organization served as a gathering place bringing together different writers and political groups.

The researchers then plan to conduct a close reading of the primary sources informed by the relationships revealed in the graphs, to generate new interpretations of the texts and cultural institutions. This combined use of distant and close reading with the Orlando dataset aims to examine the places of feminist activity and writing within modernism.

Her Life and Ideas (1899) and Sylvia (1908) use the new model of Newnham education and the radical ideas formed there as key catalysts in

developing socially and sexually progressive female protagonists. 29 The character of the Newnham College community enabled Glasier’s interest in drawing out from her fi ction an advocacy for women’s social and economic liberation. At the same time, Schreiner’s infl uence and socialist politics as boldly expressed in lectures at Newnham fostered in Glasier not just her own feminist sensibility but her literary vehicle for it. This insight into their relationship modifi es understanding of the cultural exchange and infl uence between

Newnham and its (inter)national public, both intellectual and popular,

with examples from the literature created in response.

The second, denser cluster (Fig. 5.8) contains key fi gures who studied or lived at the college and were pivotal in establishing and developing the modernist feminist tradition there, including their literary and social impacts.

Their presence elucidates Newnham as a site not only of higher education for women but of cultural production in diverse genres by women – from

the Modernism primers of Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf to the experimental fi ction of Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries May Sinclair, Mary Butts and Hope Mirrlees. One edge connects Woolf and Mary Hutchinson via the tag, relating to their suffrage activism. 30 Woolf went on to depict feminist themes of education and social progress more fully in her fi ction. Woolf and her Newnham contemporaries Mary Hutchinson and Nina Hornblum collaborated on local suffrage and women’s welfare campaigns in Cambridge in the Edwardian period.31 The graph nodes corresponding to these fi gures (Fig. 5.8 ), along with interconnecting tags like , and , render visually the intersecting feminist activism, Modernist writing networks and experimentation germinating within and radiating out from this one college community in the early twentieth century.

The passage summarizes several key points:

  • Annabel Glasier’s novels ar (1896) and Margret: A Twentieth-Century Novel (serialized 1902-03) portray universities/colleges as important for theoretical learning, but her feminist characters demonstrate the need for practical labor outside institutions alongside theoretical beliefs.

  • In Aimée Furniss, Scholar, the climax occurs when the title character prevents a destitute pregnant woman from becoming a prostitute, and they commit to raising the child together while advancing socialism. This alludes to Newnham College fostering tacit multilayered feminism developed through female intimacy and politics.

  • Examining obscure texts like Glasier’s confirms Newnham was a significant feminist institution, as it informed women’s writing careers when they promoted social/political change through feminist fiction.

  • A network graph and Orlando textbase scholarship were crucial to identifying Glasier’s role in establishing Newnham’s cultural significance, as her novels are inaccessible. It confirms feminist thinking developed in concert with relationships formed at Newnham.

  • The story “A Woman’s College from Outside” by Virginia Woolf depicts young student Angela Williams’ experiences at Newnham College in Cambridge.

  • The “Outside” of the title refers to Angela, the natural surroundings of the college, and the wider world that the college is part of.

  • Angela is drawn to another student, Alice Avery, fascinated by her knowledge and poise. She imagines kissing Alice, revealing her budding sapphic interests.

  • Angela holds her perceptions of Newnham “glowing to her breast,” indicating her private excitement and sense of the college opening doors to a “new world.”

  • Another scene conveys a sensual energy between students and faculty, and the rich atmosphere of the place itself.

  • The garden is a focal point, with students’ laughter and vitality traversing it freely, resisting notions of Newnham being insular or arid.

  • The story transforms understandings of Woolf’s career, written years before her most famous works but directly precursor to them in depicting modern women’s relationships and intellectual lives.

  • It situates Newnham among the institutions that informed feminist modernist literature through resonant imaginations and explorations of different forms of feminism within society.

  • The Western Home Monthly was published in Western Canada from 1899-1932 by Stovel Printing Company in Winnipeg. It had a comparatively modest circulation of around 180,000 but was one of the most widely read magazines in Canada.

  • While not considered a “little magazine” of avant-garde modernism, it introduced modernist aesthetics and realist styles to a mainstream readership through works by international authors.

  • It exhibited an ambivalence between modern and anti-modern, conservative and novel tendencies characteristic of middlebrow culture, which aimed to reach a mass audience with high culture.

  • An anecdote from 1901 shows its engagement with new media like phonographs and its simultaneous embrace and critique of modern tendencies toward industrial efficiency.

  • The magazine served as a venue for the development of modernist forms and communities as much as little magazines in big cultural centers, challenging notions that modernism only emerged in small avant-garde publications.

  • The passage argues periodical studies predates the focus on little magazines and modernism, just as mass periodical press predated those innovative publishing models.

  • Recent scholarship has blurred the boundaries between modernism and middlebrow culture. Works have explored aesthetic links between pieces like The Waste Land and imagery in periodicals like the Illustrated London News.

  • Scholars like Kirsten MacLeod have also argued that certain 1890s magazines displayed experimental styles similar to early 20th century little magazines.

  • Magazines like The Western Home Monthly that bridged “the sentimental and the political, realism and experimentation, and modernity and the Victorian” provide a useful site to study how modernism was adapted in mainstream printed media.

  • Digital tools now allow for new kinds of distant reading and analysis of periodical archives. This can provide insights into how magazines formally remediated emerging modernist styles across their run.

  • This chapter will analyze The Western Home Monthly digitized archive using distant reading to understand its formal dimensions and intersections between media, advertising, and fragmentation. It will also present a close reading of a single issue to show how the magazine engaged with modernist culture through remediation.

  • The goal is to demonstrate how digital analysis can provide new understandings of how magazines situated themselves within modernist developments through their own practices of remediation and adaptation.

  • The Western Home Monthly (WHM) magazine was digitized through a partnership between several groups, allowing for more in-depth analysis.

  • The digital version contains 348 issues scanned at high resolution, along with optical character recognition and metadata. This amounts to over 50,000 files and 66GB of data.

  • The metadata uses the METS and ALTO schemas to encode information about the hierarchical structure, file locations, and text/layout elements of each digitized page. This includes details on individual words, lines, advertisements, and illustrations.

  • Extracting and combining the text and metadata files in various ways enabled new analyses like topic modeling of content trends over time and simple statistical visualization of changes in page counts, ads, and illustrations each year.

  • The digitization process of remediating the magazine echoes themes in the magazine itself of media technologies influencing modernist textual forms through fragmentation, collage, and narrative disruption.

  • Preliminary analyses uncovered discussions around printing technologies, local events, and broader historical trends from the digitization and exploration of the WHM files.

  • The precipitous decline in advertising between 1929-1930 likely reflected the stock market crash in October 1929.

  • The sudden drop in illustrations around 1916 was possibly caused by a fire that ravaged the main plant of the Stovel Printing Company.

  • The steady rise in page numbers during the early 20th century could have resulted from increased circulation, changes in printing technologies, or easier access to materials.

  • The researchers chose MALLET for topic modeling and RapidMiner for text mining based on factors like their experience with the tools, size of the data, and research questions.

  • MALLET uses LDA to analyze large quantities of data and produce topics of statistically related words. This revealed patterns across the Western Home Monthly content more quickly than traditional reading.

  • RapidMiner allowed processing and analyzing the large corpus in new ways through features like tokenization, stemming, and statistical analysis.

  • Combining distant and close reading using tools like MALLET and RapidMiner alongside traditional analysis allowed effective parsing of millions of words of material.

The passage discusses how advertising increasingly impacted the magazine The Western Home Monthly between 1919-1920. Specifically, it notes that full-color covers were introduced in 1920 and color advertisements became more common. There was also a rapid rise in radio advertisements during this period.

The increasing emphasis on advertising appears to have driven several important changes to the magazine’s format and structure. First, the magazine shifted away from promoting phonographs to promoting radios as the new technology of choice. Second, the magazine’s layout became more fragmented and non-linear starting in 1919, with stories and articles continued on later pages. This created a more collage-like structure and freed up space for more advertisements.

There was also a marked increase in the use of the phrase “continued on” to signal discontinuous content scattered across issues. This non-linear structure allowed for emergence and divergent readings. Advertising amounts, illustrations, pages, and words generally increased together annually. However, during the relatively stable period of 1922-1930, advertising rises were proportional to rises in other areas. This period of narrative fragmentation and mixed genres in the magazine paralleled developments in modernist literature of the time. Overall, the passage examines how increasing emphasis on advertising impacted the magazine’s format, structure, and relationship to modernist aesthetic developments.

The passage discusses how the dynamic processes of remediation led to the adoption of distinctly modernist forms in a middlebrow magazine called The Western Home Monthly. It uses an example from the October 1925 issue, which serialized Martha Ostenso’s novel Wild Geese. In the novel excerpt, young characters gather around a phonograph listening to music. Though the phonograph seems old-fashioned, the novel was considered realistically explicit for its time in depicting topics like sexuality.

The magazine issue heavily featured the new technology of radio through advertisements, articles, and editorials debating its impacts. It showed radio becoming a standard household item. An advertisement drew parallels between listening to a radio and an elegant home concert, fusing tradition and modernity. This linked the outdated phonograph in the novel to radios, pulling the nostalgic scene into discussions of competing modern meanings. Through such remediation across various magazine elements, even a seemingly nostalgic literary passage took on modernist collage-like aesthetics influenced by changing print and advertising technologies.

The paper analyzes Kenneth Fearing’s poetic style across his career using statistical textual analysis. Fearing is best known for his early Communist-influenced works Angel Arms (1929) and Poems (1935). Critics have focused on these works and accused his later poetry of merely reworking the earlier poems.

To test if Fearing underwent a stylistic shift or just rehashed old styles, the paper analyzes the style of 142 poems from Fearing’s 5 published poetry collections between 1929-1948. It hypothesizes that Fearing’s style did evolve rather than just replicating his earlier work.

Fearing received attention early in his career for his assumed Communist views but later focused more on novels. His poetic success declined in the 1940s-50s as critics argued his newer poems just copied his impactful earlier works.

The statistical textual analysis of Fearing’s poems across his career aims to determine if his style actually changed over time or stayed the same. If a change is detected, it would disprove claims that his later poems were just reworkings of his early style. The paper aims to shed light on the trajectory of Fearing’s poetic development.

  • The study analyzes the poems of Kenneth Fearing spanning 19 years of his career from the 1920s to the 1950s.

  • Fearing’s work received mixed critical reception. Early reviews praised his unique style and use of repetition, while later critics argued his style became repetitive and ineffective.

  • By the 1940s, many reviewers felt Fearing was merely rehashing his earlier style and imagery rather than forging new territory. This led to perceptions that his later works lacked originality.

  • However, not all critics dismissed his later poems. Some acknowledged Fearing still produced quality works, even if his style became repetitive at times.

  • More recent critics have taken a more favorable view of Fearing’s entire oeuvre. But some still note his later poems did not engage with the political events of his time as much as his early poems.

  • The current study uses digital analysis tools to examine Fearing’s stylistic development across his career, analyzing his use of repetition and other markers in hopes of gaining new insights beyond existing critical narratives.

  • It involves digitizing Fearing’s complete poems, separating them by publication, and then using software to analyze stylistic patterns and differences over time. The goal is to test assumptions about shifts in Fearing’s style through computational methods.

  • The study analyzed pronoun usage in Kenneth Fearing’s poetry by normalizing the number of occurrences in each poem by the total number of words in the poem. This helps avoid a word appearing repeatedly in one poem from skewing the data.

  • Initial interest was in pronouns based on research showing suicidal poets used more first-person singular pronouns and fewer collective words. Fearing’s first-person pronoun usage was actually lower than the control group.

  • Fearing’s work showed a gradual increase in plural pronouns like “we”, suggesting a shift toward camaraderie in later works like Coney Island.

  • Usage of the pronoun “you” decreased significantly in Fearing’s last two publications compared to earlier works. This hints at a change in perspective from observer to performer based on research on pronoun perspective.

  • Analysis of third-person pronouns and consistency reports between Fearing’s works revealed divergence in some pronoun usage but increasing lexical overlap between his later publications, suggesting a continuity of stylistic shift after 1938-1940.

  • The data shows there was a stylistic change in Fearing’s poetry between 1938-1940, based on consistency levels, n-gram repetition, and sentence length.

  • Dead Reckoning and Collected Poems overlap the most in word usage and have the highest levels of n-gram repetition, likely due to their proximity in composition.

  • Dead Reckoning notably has longer average sentence lengths, lower word uniqueness, and higher use of punctuation like question marks. This marks a divergence from Fearing’s earlier style.

  • Later poems like those in Coney Island show a shift to shorter 2-gram repetition rather than the 3-7 gram patterns of earlier works.

  • Overall, the analysis indicates Fearing’s style transitioned during the 1938-1940 period to incorporate more complex sentence structures, variation in punctuation, and less extensive repetition at the phrase level. His works remained closely related to those immediately before and after.

Here is a summary of key points from the passage:

  • Analysis of pronoun usage in Fearing’s poetry shows decreasing presence of “she” over time, possibly due to naming female characters instead of using pronouns. Usage of “you” and shifts between first-person pronouns like “I” also reveal stylistic changes.

  • Two later works, Angel Arms and Coney Island, have some converging trends with lower frequencies of pronouns like “you” and “your”. Consistency analysis also finds they are less uniform with each other.

  • A significant transition in Fearing’s style occurred around 1938-1940, coinciding with his first novel publication. However, biographical details suggest other factors may have contributed to the shift.

  • Directly supervising typesetting for his poetry collection Dead Reckoning in 1938 was a unique occurrence for Fearing and may have impacted his subsequent lineation patterns and stylistic consistency.

  • The analysis provides new perspectives for further examining themes and Fearing’s changing relationship with influences like reviews that critiqued his “verbal monotony”. It also highlights varying methodologies across his poetic career.

This passage analyzes T.S. Eliot’s use of newly coined or obscure words in his poetry, and how this relates to his views on poetic tradition and diction. Some of the key points made:

  • Eliot coined several words that were later added to the Oxford English Dictionary, including “polyphiloprogenitive”, “inoperancy”, “juvescence”, “laquearia” and “piaculative”.

  • The opening word “polyphiloprogenitive” exemplifies Eliot’s view that tradition is enriched by giving new life/meaning to old words through poetic invention. A breakdown of its etymology shows how it builds on pre-existing words and meanings.

  • Similarly, “piaculative” plays with the existing but rare word “piaculum” to charge common objects (pennies) with new metaphorical weight in context.

  • Eliot’s neologisms help express new ideas while still being rooted in the history and traditions of the English language. This enactment of tradition through innovative use of words is seen as central to his theory of poetic diction.

In summary, the passage uses Eliot’s uncommon word choices to illustrate his philosophical approach of tradition being embodied through continual linguistic evolution and poetic invention within established parameters. The etymological analyses provide evidence of this process at work in his coined terms.

This passage discusses T.S. Eliot’s engagement with poetic tradition and diction. It notes that Eliot sought to free poetry from stale Victorian conventions while still drawing from older poetic traditions. Eliot coined new words like “polyphiloprogenitive” and “piaculative” that embodied this balance of innovation within tradition.

The passage contrasts Eliot’s approach with the Georgian poets, who were seen as clinging too closely to recent poetic traditions and failing to capture the modern era. However, it notes that initially the Georgians and Modernists like Eliot both aimed to reject Victorian poetic diction. Where they differed was how closely the Georgians adhered to Wordsworth and other recent poets.

The passage then discusses New Criticism and emphasizes Empson’s reliance on the Oxford English Dictionary to analyze multiplicity of meanings in poems. It acknowledges criticism of Empson’s approach as “mindless” like a machine. Finally, it poses questions about rigorously evaluating poetic diction in Eliot versus the Georgians through digital analysis of word usage in their corpora. In summary, it analyzes Eliot’s complex engagement with poetic tradition through innovation and diction.

  • The passage discusses analyzing the vocabularies of T.S. Eliot’s poems and the anthologies of Georgian poets edited by Edward Marsh to investigate claims about their poetic styles.

  • Concordances and metadata from the OED were used to analyze the ages of words used by Eliot and the Georgians. Initially, the results showed their vocabularies were surprisingly similar in terms of words from different centuries.

  • Analyzing Eliot, the Georgians and Victorian poets showed their century distributions were also very similar. But when compared to a news corpus, the poets relied more on older words.

  • Further analysis showed Eliot’s underrepresentation of 16th century words was due to using a greater number of unique 11th century words, while the Georgians used fewer unique words more frequently.

  • In conclusion, the analyses found Eliot and the Georgians had more similar vocabularies than expected based on critical claims about their differences in poetic style. Their usage patterns were also quite comparable.

  • The analysis looks at the vocabulary usage of T.S. Eliot compared to Georgian poets from the early 20th century.

  • It finds that Eliot uses a disproportionately higher percentage of words from the 11th century, which may be due to those words typically having more definitions.

  • Eliot’s usage aligns more closely with poets from the 16th century like George Herbert and John Donne, using fewer words from the 16th century than Victorian or Georgian poets.

  • This suggests Eliot was trying to “realign” English poetic tradition by returning to the vocabulary of earlier eras he saw as the foundations of modern poetry, like the 16th century metaphysical poets.

  • The analysis aims to use computational methods to empirically investigate hypotheses about literary periods and movements, but recognizes the need for humanistic literary criticism to interpret computational findings.

  • The passage performs a macro-etymological analysis of James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, examining the etymologies of words used in the novel.

  • Joyce had a keen interest in etymology and language history, as evidenced by his early essay on the subject. He believed studying word origins could reveal insights about the history of people and languages.

  • Joyce was deeply familiar with Walter Skeat’s etymological dictionary and incorporated word histories into his writing.

  • In Portrait, the protagonist Stephen Dedalus routinely contemplates words, considering their sounds, meanings and histories.

  • Choosing some words over others can indicate stylistic registers and levels of formality. It also traces Joyce’s own biographical journey across languages and nations.

  • The analysis aims to measure Stephen’s developing language through his use of Latinate words and identify how the novel’s macro-etymological signals reflect its structural elements.

  • Joyce embedded political dimensions like colonialism into his word choices. He traces the history of words to locate language among nations.

  • The indirect narrative style of Portrait, where character and narrator voices blend, lends itself well to this macro-analysis of word origins and meanings.

The analysis used a tool called the Macro-Etymological Analyzer to quantitatively analyze the linguistic components of each chapter in James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Specifically, it looked at the proportions of words originating from Latin, Greek, Germanic, and other linguistic sources.

The initial hypothesis was that the Latinate (Latin-derived) word proportion would increase throughout the novel, reflecting the maturation of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus’ language usage. While the Latinate proportion did increase from chapters 1 to 3-4, it then plateaued or dropped in chapters 5-6.

A more granular analysis examining sections within each chapter revealed a cyclical pattern - the Latinate proportion was highest at the start of each chapter and lowest at the end, in a sawtooth wave-like shape. This structural rhythm correlates with literary analyses identifying repeated cycles of epiphanic high points followed by “anti-epiphanies” in the novel’s plot and themes.

So in summary, while the overall trend was partially confirmed, breaking the analysis down into smaller textual units revealed a more complex cyclical pattern reflective of the nonlinear development portrayed in the novel. The etymological data provided quantitative evidence supporting prior qualitative literary analyses.

  • The passage discusses the oscillation between lofty visions/fantasies and earthly pragmatism in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. These map roughly to terms associated with the Latinate (L) and Germanic (G) registers.

  • A closer analysis looking at specific passages is warranted. The section with the highest L score discusses spiritual discipline, while the lowest L score passage describes a heated Christmas dinner argument in monosyllabic Germanic terms.

  • Germanic words tend to be more direct, raw, and evoke unfiltered speech. Examples are given of Stephen thinking certain Germanic words like “suck” and expressions like “rump” are impolite.

  • Germanic words also have strong sonic and visual associations for Stephen, like the onomatopoeic quality of some words. They can convey poetic aspects like alliteration.

  • Hellenic words fit contexts like discussions of Greek works, religion, education. Examples are given of sections with higher Hellenic word proportions matching these topic areas. STEPHENOS! is given as using Greek words to taunt Stephen.

In summary, the passage analyzes how Latinate, Germanic and Hellenic word origins in Joyce’s text map onto topics, tones and styles across different sections through specific examples.

The passage describes a fictional scenario of a fi cial cow adorned with a wreath. However, this summary is not based on an analysis of the actual text provided, as the text does not contain any mentions of a fi cial cow or wreath. The Macro-Etymological Analyzer that was used to analyze the text does not recognize made-up words, so it treated “Bous” and “Stephanoumenos” as errors since they are words from other languages. The summary is not reflecting the actual contents or meaning of the text.

  • The passage discusses using digital text analysis methods to explore how affect (emotion) is represented formally in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses.

  • It aims to add evidence to Fredric Jameson’s theory that modernist works like Ulysses developed a “formalism of affect” to consciously represent emotion through literary form and techniques.

  • Previous theories viewed affect as unconscious and unrepresentable, but more recent critics like Leys, Jameson, and Brinkema argue affect can be consciously represented by artists.

  • The study uses digital methods to analyze Ulysses and provide data to support Jameson’s claims about how Joyce formally represented affect through techniques like repetition, shifts in register, etc.

  • The results not only support Jameson’s theory of literary history but also provide new insights into how Joyce consciously crafted affective experiences for the reader through formal elements in Ulysses.

  • In summary, it applies computational text analysis to Ulysses to demonstrate and develop Jameson’s theory that modernist works developed a “formalism of affect” to consciously craft representations of emotion through literary form and style.

Here is a summary of e) and The Author(s) 2016:

  • Jameson identifies novelistic representations of affect and proposes a new theory of the novel in his book The Antinomies of Realism (2013). He argues that modernist novels follow from the completed history of the realist project as a dialectic between story and affect.

  • Jameson claims Ulysses occupies a liminal position between 19th century realism and post-realist modernism. In Ulysses, story has assimilated affect and realist categories may no longer be the best way to understand the novel form.

  • While assuming a turn to form demands a return to close reading, the authors argue Jameson’s close reading approach has limitations for understanding Ulysses given its omnipresent and fragmented affective forms.

  • The authors propose two objective markers of affect in Ulysses - relative absence of emotion words and presence of body-related words - and use a program called Affectcrawler to analyze affect through distant reading.

  • The section summarizes recent digital scholarship on Ulysses, grouping it into digital editions, mapping projects, and computational analyses, with the authors placing their own work in the computational analysis category.

  • The passage discusses using computational text analysis techniques like sentiment analysis to study literary texts like Ulysses. However, existing sentiment analysis tools are inadequate for literary language due to several issues.

  • Literary language involves more nuanced meanings, ambiguity, and contextualized word usage than standard language. Lexicons used in sentiment analysis are too general and don’t capture this complexity.

  • The passage proposes developing a custom lexicon specific to Ulysses by manually tagging the most common words in the text according to categories like named emotions, embodied sensations, and affective intensifiers. This accounts for unique word usages and relations in the literary text.

  • The described tool, Affectcrawler, then uses this custom lexicon to analyze Ulysses and identify passages with high densities of embodied sensations and affective intensifiers, but lower densities of named emotions. These passages are hypothesized to be sites of intense affective meaning that go beyond explicit emotion language.

  • Running Affectcrawler on Ulysses produced 219 highlighted passages. Analysis of the distribution and characteristics of these passages provides insights into how affect is created and expressed at certain moments in the text.

Here is a summary of key points from the passage:

  • The passage analyzes James Joyce’s Ulysses using a technique called “affective formalism” which involves quantifying segments of text based on certain affects or emotions.

  • It finds that episodes centered on the character Leopold Bloom have significantly higher “affect density” than those centered on Stephen Dedalus. Bloom’s episodes contain more segments tagged for affects.

  • One specific scene is analyzed where Bloom encounters a blind stripling/young man on the street. At first Bloom sees him from an emotional viewpoint of pity.

  • However, Bloom then immerses himself in the stripling’s point of view by using synesthesia - substituting touch, smell, taste for sight. He “sees” the surrounding environment through how the blind man would perceive it.

  • This allows Bloom to achieve true empathy and understand the stripling’s perspective, rather than just pitying him. It also gives Bloom a new perspective on himself.

  • The usage of synesthesia challenges the conventional realism of Ulysses by accessing perception phenomenologically rather than just empirically through the senses.

  • The passage argues this scene demonstrates how affect is used in Ulysses to represent changing points of view and empathy, especially through Bloom’s character.

  • In the Proteus episode of Ulysses, Stephen contemplates the nature of perception and what it would be like not to be able to perceive the world visually. He imagines “shutting his eyes” and feeling his way without sight.

  • Unlike Bloom, who finds discovery in imagined blindness, Stephen finds it risky and anxiety-inducing. He fears falling over a cliff or being “forever in the black adiaphane” without vision.

  • Stephen never experiences synesthesia, or blending of senses, like Bloom does. The blind remain “them” to Stephen rather than experiences he can enter into.

  • Bloom, on the other hand, imagines what the world looks like to his cat and strives to experience it from the cat’s perspective through affective imagination rather than rational understanding.

  • This ability to enter into different embodied perspectives through affective imagination, rather than rely on rational processes, is what enables Joyce’s depictions of affect according to the analysis.

  • The authors discuss the potential and limitations of their textual analysis method using an “Affectcrawler” algorithm and word lists, and consider ways to improve and expand the approach.

  • The researchers compiled lists of the 2,000 most commonly occurring words in Middlemarch and Ulysses and categorized them based on concrete perceptual qualities (B, sensory words), emotions (E words), and ideas/cognition (I words).

  • They found far fewer words fell into these categories in Middlemarch compared to Ulysses, initially supporting Jameson’s claim that Middlemarch represents a less affective style of novel.

  • They then ran their Affectcrawler tool, which identifies affective passages, on both books. It found significantly fewer highly affective passages in Middlemarch than Ulysses, around a quarter as many.

  • Some of this difference could be attributed to fewer words being categorized in Middlemarch, but not fully. They believe Middlemarch focuses more on conventional emotions at a conceptual rather than physical/sensory level.

  • Surprisingly, the optimal segment length identified by Affectcrawler was around the same (20 words) for both books, despite expectations that affect would be conveyed over shorter segments in Middlemarch.

  • This suggests the type of affect Affectcrawler detects may be consistent across periods/genres, or that affect in Middlemarch is more similar to Ulysses than expected. Studying this further could provide insights into literary representations of affect over time.

The author runs an online archive of modernist poet Mina Loy’s poetry that aims to preserve the typographic properties of her work as accurately as possible in digital form. When teaching one of Loy’s poems through a link to an existing online version, they discovered that not preserving the original spacing distorted the meaning and effect of the text.

Loy’s use of typography, like fragmentation and spacing of lines, was integral to conveying experiences that pushed beyond traditional boundaries of self and subjectivity. This typographic experimentation challenged masculine notions of singular genius promoted by Italian Futurism. In digitizing Loy’s work, the author found that HTML resists this kind of experimentation, highlighting how Loy critiqued not just Futurism but also prevailing rational modes of information and modernist typography.

The author analyzes several poems from Loy’s Songs to Joannes cycle to show how her typography enacts a heterogeneous, multi-perspectival approach rather than singular subjecthood. This dismantles the cult of male genius and traces how physical limitations obscure cosmic potentials. Loy’s typography furthers this fracturing approach to reality and underscores the blindness of her subject Joannes.

The poem describes two figures fighting or interacting in a contest between their “inviolate egos.” The fragmented language and line breaks work to depict the fragmentation of consciousness, as the characters experience internal desires and external demands. This suggests an oscillation not only between the two people but within their own identities as well.

The challenging aspect is sorting out who is speaking from the various fragments within a line. Ultimately for Loy’s vision, it may not matter who is speaking. The poem concludes on a note of unity, suggesting an experience of ego-death or “Nirvana” where identities become blurred and “Depersonalized/Identical.”

This vision contrasts with Marinetti’s Futurism, which celebrated a violent multitude on the brink of explosion. Loy offers a vision of identification, experiential peace and a post-ego polyvocal cosmos. She differentiates this from Marinetti’s militant imagery and concept of art as violence.

The discussion then analyzes Loy’s use of machinery imagery. She presents an alternative vision of machinery that moves beyond the stereotypical notions of the time, embracing fluidity over a fragmented body. This aligns more with Marx’s concept of machinery as a social network exceeding individual capacities, rather than the alienated worker.

The project aims to understand the “machinic culture” that Mina Loy anticipates in her work, while recognizing that that same machinic culture nullifies the force of her insight. Loy critiques the idea of the machine as a mechanism and envisions it more as an ecological network.

Alan Turing later outlined the concept of a theoretical “universal machine” in his 1950 paper “On Computable Numbers.” Though meant as a thought experiment, this abstract machine came to define modern computers. Turing recognized that this universal machine was just a model and could never physically exist as described.

Loy, Turing, and Marx all saw the machine not as a single mechanism but as a broader ecology. Loy’s poetry presents a fragmented experience of modernity and critiques the mechanistic view of the machine promoted by Futurists like Marinetti.

Presenting Loy’s poetry online poses challenges as HTML was designed for linear textual documents rather than her fragmented style involving precise typography and spacing. The summarizer explores some of these challenges around representing Loy’s poetry using HTML.

  • The   character in HTML is used to create a non-breaking space that prevents content from wrapping to the next line. It was commonly used in early web design to position elements by creating horizontal white space with multiple   characters.

  • However, using   for design runs counter to HTML’s original purpose as a data description language. CSS was later developed to allow for more sophisticated layout without having to resort to  .

  • Early versions of HTML focused on markup for technical documents and had little ability for complex page layout. Mina Loy’s modernist poetry challenged this linear model of text with its fragmentation and use of space.

  • Converting Loy’s poetry to HTML required using many   characters to recreate the line spacing, going against the “lawful” standards. Her poetry resisted being chopped up into logical blocks as HTML envisioned text.

  • Much of what is considered good web design today derives from principles of modernist avant-garde design from the early 20th century, though this has been naturalized. Loy’s poetry departed from even this model through its agitation against a single coherent perspective.

  • As a result, Loy’s radical style highlights the difficulty of rendering non-hegemonic, unstructured texts within the limitations of early HTML models of textuality.

The article discusses educational technology expert Audrey Watters’ argument that the continuation of “mansplaining” online and the growing harassment of women and minorities results from a structural bias toward white men that is built into the core of modern technology itself.

Watters writes that the internet and computer technology were largely designed by men from developed countries, so they reflect those designers’ privileges and biases. As a result, the internet presumes perspectives of maleness, whiteness, and “California-ness.” Despite hopes that new technologies would promote equality and access, they actually serve to reinforce existing hierarchies of power.

Watters concludes that online spaces cannot escape influences from the physical world. The very infrastructure of these technologies encodes a specific identity and perspective. For feminist critics like Watters, dismissing issues of invisibility for women and minorities is not enough - the problem lies deeper, in how technologies are designed and structured from the beginning. The article discusses how Watters’ analysis relates to other perspectives on biases in technological and design frameworks.

Here is a summary of the key points from the chapter overview:

  • The author examines how representational monsters in films utilizing CGI (computer generated imagery) carry forth modernist mythologies about sovereignty, capitalism, and the idealized human.

  • They argue that current scholarship on CGI tends to ascribe a positivist understanding of legibility/visuality that inherits assumptions from digital humanities. Specifically, that the human form can be accurately recognized.

  • The author contends that every frame with a CGI monster is equally a frame with an algorithmically driven “human”, as CGI remakes and composites all elements of the digital frame.

  • They take issue with analyses that concentrate the “algorithm” only on the non-human or monstrous form, effectively erasing how the digital human form is also created.

  • As an alternative, the author proposes examining how all digital imagery is the result of algorithmic processing and compositing, not just what is visibly altered. And that we as viewers cannot decipher what has been digitally altered.

  • Through analyzing behind-the-scenes CGI footage, the author aims to show digital imagery should be read as fully “algorithmic and contaminated,” not with assumptions about what is recognizably human vs monster.

So in summary, the chapter critiques how current scholarship focuses analyses on the CGI monster rather than recognizing all digital imagery is equally algorithmically composed.

  • Derrida argues that the animal/beast realm is often represented as the realm of the non-political, opposed to the human political realm. However, the state and sovereignty have also been symbolized through animal/beast monstrosity - figures without form representing mythological monsters.

  • Jeon sees the animal/non-human as a vehicle for social anxiety. Derrida adds that this realm of the non-political is where sovereignty is formally expressed through non-human monstrosity.

  • Monsters in films like Godzilla, Frankenstein, and The Host can thus symbolize the monstrosity of financial sovereignty and the cultural anxieties it produces.

  • If neoliberal capitalism manifests one such anxiety, the ability of CGI humans to destroy monsters in films allegorically represents the transference of power, not just its invisibility.

  • Examining the narrative more closely shows it assumes we can manage neoliberal capitalism’s invisibility by making it visible and killing its visible form through human intelligence and technology. But this ignores how technology also alters the human form.

  • Imaging technologies like CGI were largely created to better idealize and alter the human form, not just depict monsters. The political implications of narratives that only focus on “unkilling” invisible forces through the representation of idealized humans needs to be considered.

  • Lev Manovich proposes a concept of “social physics” to analyze data from selfies on Instagram in order to plot out a visual exhibition. He views humans as discrete “atoms” that can be quantified and studied scientifically.

  • Elizabeth Losh argues this reduces humans to data points and flattens out their complex lived experiences. Visuality performs this flattening by rendering invisible labor and politics as visible standardized data.

  • Both Manovich and theorist Jeon centralize rendering the invisible visible through digital representation, but this process of visibility perpetuates modernist power dynamics as described by theorist Wendy Chun.

  • Donna Haraway critiques how vision and technology are tied up with militarism, capitalism and male supremacy, arguing the “god trick” of seeing everything objectively actually constitutesgluttonous deregulated power.

  • Race and software shape our understanding of “programmed visions” through the interface according to Chun. The author aims to further examine how the “god trick” becomes programmed and circulated through digital technologies and scholarship.

  • Rather than focusing on CGI monsters as representations of capitalism, the author argues it is better to examine digital compositing practices which fully contaminate the screen through layering, editing and rendering multiple parts into a combined whole.

  • Scenes from HBO’s John Adams are used to demonstrate how extensive digital compositing is for seemingly “realist” representations in visual media production today.

  • The author argues against using “surface reading” approaches to analyze digital objects and visualizations of computational processes like CGI. Surface readings focus only on descriptive analysis of visual elements and ignore deeper cultural, historical and political contexts.

  • Digital objects are complex and multilayered, composed of many technical and representational layers. Surface readings cannot capture this complexity and fail to address how digital forms materialize and circulate within economic systems.

  • When applied to digital humanities, surface readings tend to just “modernize” understandings of digital texts rather than critically analyze digital cultural production and the power dynamics within computational systems.

  • The author analyzes frames from the TV show John Adams to show how CGI is used to composite idealized political figures and crowds from many technical rendering layers. This constructs representations that erase human imperfections.

  • Overall, the author argues digital humanities need approaches that can materialize how digital visualizations shape understandings of power within neoliberal capitalism and its financial systems, not just describe computational surfaces. Allegories are needed that center issues like racial capitalism rather than focus only on technological displays of crisis.

  • The author argues that describing the 2008 financial crisis as an isolated “economic crisis” fails to account for the systemic nature of corruption within financial capitalism. The corruption is institutionalized and ongoing, not a singular event.

  • Racial capitalism, not the 2008 crisis, should be seen as the ongoing crisis. Financial predation and the institutionalized impoverishment of Black and Brown communities has been a constant condition, not a temporary crisis.

  • Speculative financial trading began not with modern technology but with the transatlantic slave trade, which was itself a speculative market. Slavery and its markets laid the foundations for Wall Street.

  • Describing 2008 as “the crisis” centers the narratives and effects on white finance and economies, failing to account for the invisibilized populations most damaged by ongoing economic oppression.

  • The project of making the “invisible visible” is impossible within racial capitalism, as it would require overturning the entire racist socioeconomic system that deems certain groups and realities as illegible or invisible.

  • Japanese photographer Shohei Hirata argues that camera sensor technology and filmmaking algorithms are inherently racist. Sensor technology and color calibration are optimized for lighting conditions that best represent light skin tones.

  • In darkened areas like shadows on faces, noise/grain is more likely to occur and be interpreted as natural on light skin but not dark skin. Even the best sensors handle brightness in ways that make light skin look natural.

  • The way sensors are tuned to accept and interpret light and color is essentially an algorithm. These algorithms calibrate sensors to a specific portion of the light spectrum to represent colors in a way that suits some skin tones over others.

  • Hirata asserts that this technology, which has developed over decades, is racist as it privileges certain representations of humans over others based on skin color. The very fundamentals of how digital filmmaking captures and processes images carry forward a history of optimizing imagery for white subjects.

In addition, Hirata argues that this history of optimized photography for white skin is embedded in modern digital filmmaking technology through sensor algorithms and calibrations that still favor lighting conditions for lighter skin tones over darker ones. This demonstrates how racial biases can be systematically built into core technological functions and persist over time.

  • The passage lists various authors and works cited in a Digital Modernism study. Some notable mentions include T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Mina Loy, Kenneth Fearing, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis.

  • Methodologies referenced include distant reading, digital literary studies, computational analysis techniques like latent semantic analysis and n-gram analysis, as well as XML markup and mapping.

  • Institutions mentioned are the Harvard lab, MIT Media Lab, Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), and the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory.

  • Themes covered relate to feminism, modernist laboratories, hypermediacy, British Mass-Observation movement, Futurism, Celtic and Gaelic studies, and distant reading of corpora like the Brown News Corpus.

  • There are references to digital projects like Digital Initiatives, Editing Modernism in Canada at the University of Alberta (EMiC UA), and JoyceWays.

  • The passage touches on computer-generated imagery and monsters, neoliberal financial capitalism, and visualization techniques for corpora and texts.

Here is a summary of the chapters:

  • Chapter 2 discusses new-media modernism and the concept of “ModLabs” - laboratory modernisms in modernist arts that incorporated new media technologies. It covers topics like laboratory modernisms, laboratories/collaboratories/observatories, and modularity.

  • Chapter 3 models modernist dialogism through close reading with big data. It analyzes The Waste Land and other works to identify voice switches, stylistic profiles, and free indirect discourse through computational methods. It discusses how big data can be used within the hermeneutic circle of interpretation.

  • Chapter 4 presents a methodology for spatial analysis of modernist works through mapping and 3D modeling. It maps locations in Nightwood, Quartet, and depicts modernist Paris on the z-axis. The chapter analyzes how space is portrayed in works by Djuna Barnes and Jean Rhys.

  • The chapters thus showcase different field-specific digital humanities approaches focused on modernist literature and arts, applying computational methods to analyze modernist dialogism, map spatial representations, and contextualize new media influences.

Here is a summary of the key points from the chapters:

  • Chapters 1-2 introduce the concept of OrlandoVision (OViz), a digital tool for studying relationships between texts graphically. It is applied to two case studies - the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and Newnham College.

  • Chapter 6 examines how The Western Home Monthly remediated older and new media forms through a digital analysis. It explores how modernist forms developed from this remediation process.

  • Chapter 7 performs a statistical analysis of type/token ratios and n-gram repetition in Kenneth Fearing’s poetry to study his stylistic perspectives.

  • Chapter 8 takes a computational approach to analyzing T.S. Eliot’s poetic diction.

  • Chapter 9 conducts a macro-etymological analysis of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to break down its word origins.

  • Chapter 10 proposes an “affective formalism” approach to studying Ulysses through analyzing its body language.

  • Chapter 11 examines modernist spaces and information machinery in Mina Loy’s work using HTML coding and typography.

  • Chapter 12 discusses how modernist art explored composite human forms and surfaces through digital visualization tools, critiquing their implications.

The chapters thus employ digital humanities tools and quantitative/computational analyses to examine themes of modernism, feminism, media remediation and stylistic perspectives in key modernist texts.

#book-summary
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About Matheus Puppe