10,000 downloads at SSRN (Social Science Research Network)

SSRN is the first online paper depository I joined – I later joined Academic.edu and ResearchGate. I joined it on November 8, 2009, so I could deposit my first paper on cognitive science and literature:

A day later, Nov. 9, I deposited three more papers:

Those are perhaps my four most important literary studies papers. The "Kubla Khan" is based on my 1972 MA thesis at Johns Hopkins. That's the work that lead me to suspect that something was seriously amiss in academic literary criticism, that we had neglected to study form and so did not have basic descriptive control over our materials. That's the work that sent me to the cognitive sciences, and "Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics" is what became of that interest. I constructed a cognitive network model for some of the semantic structures underlying Shakespare's Sonnet 129, "Lust in Action."

I coauthored the third paper, "Metaphor, Recognition, and Neural Process" with David Hays, who had been my teacher and mentor during my graduate work at SUNY Buffalo. I learned computational semantics from him. In this paper we proposed a neural account of how the significance of 'fresh' metaphor – metaphor that presents itself as such, as opposed to 'dead' metaphor which as disappeared into ordinary semantics – is computed in the brain. In this we drew on Karl Pribram's idea that cortical processing is fundamentally holograpic in nature. The notion of convolution is central to that process. Convolution, as you may know, has become central to recent work in artificial neural networks.

The fourth paper, "Literary Morphology," is a long paper from 2009 and is the closest I have come to a theoretical and methodological statement of what I've come to believe in three decades of work on literature (and other things). As the subtitle indicates, form is central to my thinking, not merely the idea of form – as in standard issue literary formalism – but the description and analysis of form. I argue that form is fundamentally computational (while metaphor processing would be sub-computational in current terminology).

If we order my papers according to downloads, these are the top three:

You'll notice that "Music and the Prevention and Amelioration of ADHD" is the oldest of those, uploaded in 2009. It was my most popular paper until one of the other two was uploaded. Why? I'm not sure, but I'd guess because it's about ADHA. I uploaded the Dennett paper in 2013. I'd guess it's popular because Dennett, though cultural evolution is increasingly popular, and that surely has something to do with its popularity as well as I've got two other papers with "Dennett" in the title and they're not nearly so popular (less than 60 downloads each). And then we have the Dumbo paper. I'm glad it's popular as I like it, and the movie, a lot. But I don't know why it's so popular. Disney? Dumbo? Did the 2019 Tim Burton remake of Dumbo create interest in the Disney original? I don't know.

My fourth most popular paper:

I can understand its popularity easily enough; Latour is a popular thinker. I note that, at 309 downloads, it's way behind the ADHD paper, at 415. The fifth most popular paper, at 269 downloads, is my "Kubla Khan" paper. That's not my oldest paper, nor the first one I uploaded (it's the second one), but it is my oldest work. That's a good place to end.