Ted Underwood on Intellectual Genealogies: Distant Reading is Social-Science, Not Digital Humanities [#DH]

Ted Underwood, “A Genealogy of Distant Reading”, DHQ Vol. 11, No. 2, 2017:

Abstract: It has recently become common to describe all empirical approaches to literature as subfields of digital humanities. This essay argues that distant reading has a largely distinct genealogy stretching back many decades before the advent of the internet – a genealogy that is not for the most part centrally concerned with computers. It would be better to understand this field as a conversation between literary studies and social science, inititated by scholars like Raymond Williams and Janice Radway, and moving slowly toward an explicitly experimental method. Candor about the social-scientific dimension of distant reading is needed now, in order to refocus a research agenda that can drift into diffuse exploration of digital tools. Clarity on this topic might also reduce miscommunication between distant readers and digital humanists.

Rather than attempt to summarize it myself, I’ll present a set of tweets by Alan Liu, starting with this:

Made 41 annotations in my copy of @tedunderwood's new, crucial DHQ piece, "A Genealogy of Distant Reading" https://t.co/CIuXj7uAdH.

— Alan Liu (@alanyliu) July 10, 2017

Liu continues with a long series of tweets, which I’ll present as quotes without the Twitter format. Along the way I will present brief comments of my own, thus inserting my own concerns into the argument.

Liu begins:

Here are my top 13 quotes--a kind of thirteen ways of looking at distant reading, cited by paragraph number.

(As it were: "Among twenty snowy mountains of texts, The only moving thing Was the eye of the distant reader"):

¶5: "The questions posed by distant readers were originally framed by scholars (like Raymond Williams and Janice Radway) who worked on the boundary between literary history and social science."

¶10: "these projects … pose broad historical questions about literature, and answer them by studying samples of social or textual evidence. I want to highlight the underlying project of experimenting on samples, and the premise that samples … have to be constructed"

¶21 "The crucial underlying similarity between [Radway & Moretti's] works, which has made both of them durably productive models for other scholars, is simply the decision to organize critical inquiry as an experiment."

¶22 "Distant reading is a historical science, and it will need to draw on something like Carol Cleland’s definition of scientific method, which embraces not only future-oriented interventions, but any systematic test that seeks 'to protect … from misleading confirmations.'"

¶22 "Literary historians who use numbers will have to somehow combine rigor with simplicity, and prune back a thicket of fiddly details that would be fatal to our reason for caring about the subject."

¶24 "I try not to join any debate about the representativeness of different samples until I have seen some evidence that the debate makes a difference to the historical question under discussion…. [S]amples are provisional, purpose-built things. They are not canons. It makes no sense to argue about their representativeness in the abstract, before a question is defined."

¶27 "Instead of interpreting distant reading as a normative argument about the discipline, it would be better to judge it simply by asking whether the blind spot it identified is turning out to contain anything interesting."

¶28 "Consensus about new evidence emerges very slowly: inventing an air-pump doesn’t immediately convince readers that vacuums exist…. But at this point, there is no doubt in my mind that literary scholarship turned out to have a blind spot. Many important patterns in literary history are still poorly understood, because they weren’t easily grasped at the scale of individual reading."

Alan Liu on Birth of the Cool

Yesterday I'd posted about Olivier Morin & Alberto Acerbi (2016): Birth of the cool: a two-centuriesdecline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction, Cognition and Emotion. Alan Liu now has a series of tweets about Morin and Acerbi.

Article is impressive for sheer # of possible explanations considered, all shown to be false. Why do affectively positive words decline? https://t.co/AYVgkO3CMI

— Alan Liu (@alanyliu) December 10, 2016

Odd that the study looks only at literature, though, for reasons I speculate on in my "N + 1" DH piece: https://t.co/x8FAHxiRun

— Alan Liu (@alanyliu) December 10, 2016

Perfect case to be made here for additional "small corpora" of such material as newspapers, film transcripts, children's books, etc.

— Alan Liu (@alanyliu) December 10, 2016

Most fundamental mystery left by the article: what model of humans/society is it proposing? Does positive affect just disappear psychically

— Alan Liu (@alanyliu) December 10, 2016

or socially over time? Or does it move into a different register of expression somewhere? Is the total sum of affect fixed or dynamic?

— Alan Liu (@alanyliu) December 10, 2016

For the beginnings of an answer to Liu, see my recent post, Change in national mood shows up in patterns of word usage observed in historical databases, which is links to a recent article on "linguistic positivity bias" (LPB).

Digital Humanities in the cross-hairs, with the cavalry on the way

Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia have published a critique of digital humanities (mostly just digital work in english lit.) in the LARB: Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities. Here's the opening paragraph:

Advocates position Digital Humanities as a corrective to the “traditional” and outmoded approaches to literary study that supposedly plague English departments. Like much of the rhetoric surrounding Silicon Valley today, this discourse sees technological innovation as an end in itself and equates the development of disruptive business models with political progress. Yet despite the aggressive promotion of Digital Humanities as a radical insurgency, its institutional success has for the most part involved the displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the manufacture of digital tools and archives. Advocates characterize the development of such tools as revolutionary and claim that other literary scholars fail to see their political import due to fear or ignorance of technology. But the unparalleled level of material support that Digital Humanities has received suggests that its most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university.

It has provided 30 comments so far, most of them critical. It also provoked Alan Liu to respond with a twitter stream which he then Storified: On Digital Humanities and "Critique". He his not happy, referring to the article's "character assassination of the still evolving field of DH...as an attempt at a last word foreclosing the critical potential of DH". Liu also posted drafts from a book he's working on:

“Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity (book in progress.” Alan Liu, 2 May 2016. http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/drafts-for-against-the-cultural-singularity

I'm about to read through the drafts. Here's Liu's opening paragraph:

My aim in this book is to make a strategic intervention in the development of the digital humanities. Following up on my 2012 essay, “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”, I call for digital humanities research and development informed by, and able to influence, the way scholarship, teaching, administration, support services, labor practices, and even development and investment strategies in higher education intersect with society, where a significant channel of the intersection between the academy and other social sectors, at once symbolic and instrumental, consists in shared but contested information-technology infrastructures. I first lay out in the book a methodological framework for understanding how the digital humanities can develop a mode of critical infrastructure studies. I then offer a prospectus for the kinds of infrastructure (not only research “cyberinfrastructures,” as they have been called) whose development the digital humanities might help create or guide. And I close with thoughts on how the digital humanities can contribute to ameliorating the very idea of “development”–technological, socioeconomic, and cultural–today.

Hyperobjects and "Distant Reading"

Two successive tweets from Alan Liu:

— Alan Liu (@alanyliu) May 31, 2014

So, topic models. Is the model the hyperobject or is it simply a description of the hyperobject? Consider one of Morton's core examples, global warming. Surely global warming is the hyperobject while a given climate model simply provides a description of that hyperobject. It's global warming that is "massively distributed in time and space," not a given climate model. The climate model is just a bunch of code running on a computer, which is fairly compact in time and space.

And so it must be with a topic model and whatever cultural hyperobject it models. Thus, when Goldstone and Underwood developed topic models for over a century's worth of articles in literary studies (The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us  [PDF preprint]) literary studies is the hyperobject and, as such, is distinct from their topic models (which you can explore interactively HERE, introduction HERE). 

The Only Game in Town: Remarks on Alan Liu and Digital Humanities

I've collected five posts on Alan Liu into a single PDF. You can download it from my SSRN page: Remarks on Alan Liu and the Digital Humanities, A Working Paper. Abstract and introduction below.

* * * * *

Abstract: Alan Liu has been organizing and conceptualizing digital humanities (DH) for two decades. I consider a major essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” two interviews, one with Katherine Hayles and the other with Scott Pound, and a major blog post in which Liu engages Stephen Ramsay. Other investigators included: Willard McCarty and Franco Moretti. Some of Liu’s themes: DH as symbolic of the future of the humanities, the need for theory as well as practical projects, the role of DH in enlarging the scope of the “thinkable,” the importance of an engineering mindset, and the need for a long-term effort in revivifying the humanities.

* * * * *

Computation has theoretical consequences—possibly, more than any other field of literary study. The time has come, to make them explicit.

–Franco Moretti

I first heard about Alan Liu back in the late 1990s, when he was working on Voice of the Shuttle. I may or may not have submitted some links, I don’t really remember, but if so, that would have been it. Since then I gather that he’s been acting as a Johnny Appleseed for what has come to be called digital humanities, an ambassador, or in the corporate jargon of Apple Inc., an evangelist.

But it wasn’t until early in 2012 that I started to focus on the so-called digital humanities (aka DH). To be sure, Matt Kirschenbaum showed up at The Valve (alas, now dormant) for the Moretti book event (Graphs, Maps, Trees) and, for that matter, Moretti himself put in a few appearances. I snagged a promising book reference from Kirschenbaum (Dominic Widdows, Geometry and Meaning), but for me that event was about Moretti, not DH. It took Stanley Fish to get me thinking about DH. He’d gone to the MLA convention, attended some DH sessions, and blogged about it in January, 2012: Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation. Of my posts tagged “digital humanities”, only a bit less than a quarter of them were written before Fish. The rest come after.

Sometime in the wake of Fish I came across anxiety within the DH community about the lack of Theory, with Alan Liu prominent among the worriers. Now I was irritated. On the one hand, it seems to me that Theory has lost most of its energy – for what it's worth, it was an examination of that morbidity that had attracted me to The Valve (the discussions of Theory’s Empire) in the summer of 2005. On the other hand, there’s a rich body of theory around computation, language, the mind, and evolutionary process (read: history) which is relevant, it seemed to me, to DH and yet which has been for the most part neglected. There is more to theorizing humanity than is dreamt of in Theory.

Finally, in March of this year I saw a video of Liu’s Meaning of the Humanities talk at NYU. I watched it, liked it, and contacted Alan. He responded by sending me a PDF of his PMLA article of the same title (“The Meaning of the Digital Humanities”, PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423). That prompted me to write the first of the blog posts I’ve collected here: Computer as Symbol and Model: On reading Alan Liu.

To Capture Infinity in a Bottle: The Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism

The Gist: The only way the digital humanities are going to develop a cultural analytics that is sui generis is by thinking about the nature of computation itself in relation to human minds, as embodied in human brains, and as developing though interaction with other minds through various media and in groups of varying size and social structure. Otherwise the digital humanities will have no choice by to borrow its cultural concepts from other discourses, as it is now doing.

* * * * *

Let has start from some passages. First up, Alan Liu, from “Why I’m In It” x 2 – Antiphonal Response to Stephan Ramsay on Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism (September 13, 2013):

The digital humanities can only take on their full importance when they are seen to serve the larger humanities (and arts, with affiliated social sciences) in helping them maintain their ability to contribute to the making of the full wealth of society, where “wealth” here has its older, classic sense of “well-being” or the good life woven together with the life of good.

Compare that with Willard McCarty, A telescope for the mind? (Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): “What can the digital humanities can do for the humanities as a whole that helps these disciplines improve the well-being of us all?”

Back to Liu:

It seems to me that digital humanists can and should evolve a mode of cultural criticism that is uniquely their own and not a mere echo of fading humanist cultural criticism by treating their immediate objects of inquiry (academically-oriented technologies and methods) as always also “mediate objects of inquiry” bearing on the way the human beings they wish their students could become (and they themselves could be on their best days) can really engage meaningfully with larger social agents and forces....The goal is to do research, to teach, and to live as if humanities technology is constantly intertwined with, reacts to, and acts on the way the links are now being forged between individuals (starting with those in the academy where we teach and conduct research) and the social-economic-political-technological constitution of contemporary society.

What it comes down to is that the digital humanities need both to work on tools and methods in their own institutional place (the academy) and to develop a capable imagination of the relation of that unique institutional place (or family of variant institutional spaces) to the other major institutions that play a part in enabling or thwarting the passageway from private human subjectivity to public social sensibility.

It seems that Liu is imagining a cultural criticism centered on institutions and society, one that treats computers and minds as black boxes whose inner workings remain unexamined. In this practice it seems to me that the ideas about culture and society would likely come from already existing bodies of work.

Shades of the tabula rasa, something’s happening here…an open letter to Alan Liu

An open letter to Alan Liu concerning the notion of a tabula rasa interpretation which he introduced, though not in his own person, in “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” (PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423).

Hi Alan,

You know, in a way Stanley Fish anticipated the notion of a tabula rasa interpretation way back in his 1973 essay, “What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It? (reprinted in Is There a Text in This Class?, which is where my page numbers come from). Fish takes on an article by the linguist Michael Halliday, remarking that Halliday has a considerable conceptual apparatus – an attribute of many modern linguistic theories, lots of categories and relationships, all tightly defined. After quoting a passage in which Halliday analysis a single sentence from Through the Looking Glass, Fish remarks (p. 80):

When a text is run through Halliday’s machine, it’s parts are first dissembled, then labeled, and finally recombined in their original form. The procedure is a complicated one, and it requires many operations, but the critic who performs them has finally done nothing at all.

Now, though I am familiar with some of Halliday’s work, I’ve not yet read that particular essay. Still, Fish’s characterization seems fair, and would apply to many similar and even not-so-similar models. Note, however, that he frames Halliday’s essay as one of many lured on by “the promise of an automatic interpretive procedure” (p. 78).

That, it seems to me, is the tabula rasa interpretation which you see as the goal of a least some digital critics. To be sure, Halliday did his work manually, but by that time the computer was very much in the air. On the one hand, Chomsky’s linguistics was driven by the notion of an abstract computer, but also computer-based statistical stylistics was fairly well established and Fish also hacks away at some of that work.

But, as far as I can tell, and I’ve been thinking about this for a lllllloooonng time, with one odd exception, there is never going to be any such thing as an automatic interpretive procedure.

Ring Composition in Alan Liu’s Essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities”

I would like to conclude Alan Liu week at New Savanna by returning to the point where I began, his essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” (PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423). As I was writing my original post I was struck by a paragraph-opening sentence near the end: “It is not accidental, I can now reveal, that at the beginning of this essay I alluded to Lévi-Strauss and structural anthropology.” The sentence clearly states that Liu did something at the beginning of the essay so as to set us up for something coming at the end. There’s nothing unusual in that; skillful, and even not so skillful, writers do that sort of thing all the time.

But Liu’s telling us about his rhetorical slight of hand? Why? I don’t know and, to be honest, that particular question only just now occurred to me as I’m writing this post.

What struck me a week ago when I pasted that sentence into my post and then reread it was the possibility that Liu’s article was an example of ring-composition – which, you may know, is one of my interests. While I first learned about ring forms in a 1976 article by R. G. Peterson, Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature (PMLA 91, 3: 367-375) it was the late Mary Douglas who got me to think seriously about ring-forms; she devoted her final book to them, Thinking in Rings: An Essay in Ring Composition (Yale 2007).

But that was about literary texts of one sort or another. Douglas was particularly interested in Old Testament texts, but had also worked on Tristram Shandy; others were interested in the Homeric texts; I’ve been most interested in films, most recently Gojira (Godzilla), a 1954 Japanese film. But Liu’s essay is not a literary text, nor a religious one. No one to my knowledge has investigated ring composition in expository prose.

So, why would such a question arise in the case of Liu’s essay? Well, consider what is generally meant by ring-form. Such texts generally a form like this: A, B, … X … B’, A’. So, let us substitute “Levi-Strauss” for A in that structural pattern:

Lévi-Strauss, B, … X … B’, Lévi-Strauss’

If Liu’s essay follows that pattern then I need to find something that’s structurally central and at least one pair of elements that are closely related to one another where one comes before and the other after the structural center.

Alan Liu: Reengaging the Humanities

Alan Liu week continues at New Savanna. Now I want to look at an interview he gave to Scott Pound at Amodern: Reengaging the Humanities. While the interview is worthwhile in its entirety I’ll select passages where Liu’s thinking (usefully) intersects with my own.

First, though, I want to cite a biographical passage which speaks to attitude and intuition. While talking about Bruno Latour’s interrogation of critique in the name of compositionalism Liu informs us that he’s “the son of a structural engineer and descended from a whole clan who were allowed to immigrate to the U.S. because they were engineers and builders.”

Yes.

And I’m the son of a chemical engineer who spent his professional career in the coal business. Engineering is about designing things and building them.* I used “Speculative Engineering” as the title for the preface to my book on music (Beethoven’s Anvil) because I wanted to emphasize the constructive nature of my enterprise. I talked about the building blocks I played with as a child and posed the question: “How does the nervous system design and construct music?” (xiii). I think about literary texts and systems of texts in the same way: How are they built?

Returning to Liu, he has quite a bit to say about critique and compositionism. Note his use of engineering language in the following passage:

Critique and compositionism are best understood as arcs in a common cycle of thought, whether at the level of individual projects or of longer generational agendas. Think of it this way: in any project there are tactically important moments when critique is constructive, e.g., at the beginning when assessing what is wrong with precedents or in the middle after the first prototype. Equally, there are tactically shrewd moments when composited methods and viewpoints are constructive, e.g., when the architect pitches a project to a client and has to incorporate the client’s views, when the architect then has to adjust plans in response to the structural engineer, and when the engineer subsequently has to adjust plans in response to the contractors, not to mention the tactically decisive construction workers who actually wield the hammers). It’s just that neither critique nor compositionism has a right to rule as the “last word” in the process–the terminal stage, the end result, the payoff, the final record. In the humanities, I feel, we have fallen into the rut of thinking that interpretive discourse (e.g., a critical essay) should be the final statement of a project, and, further, that critique should be the final payoff of interpretation. [Emphasis mine, WLB] But what if we were to position interpretive discourse and critique elsewhere in the cycle of thought that goes into a project? Compositionism would then not be antithetical to critique; it would include the arc of critique, and vice versa, as part of the rolling launch of thought.

Perhaps we should remind ourselves that the primacy of interpretation is a relatively recent development in our disciplinary history, mostly post World War II, and that literary culture managed to function for centuries without a guild of professional interpreters.

The Thinkable and the Interesting: Katherine Hayles Interviews Alan Liu

Back in October of 2008 Katherine Hayles interviewed Alan Liu about the use of digital technology in the humanities. That interview is one of 20 you can access on the web HERE.

I’m particularly interested in Liu’s remarks here and there on “thinkability” and what people find interesting. Liu wonders why, for example, when online publication allows for multimedia texts, most online scholarship is fairly traditional in form and presentation. This particular topic takes from a discussion of an online journal Liu has been involved with, Postmodern Culture.

The following remarks are relatively early in the 50 minute interview (my transcription):

Hayles (6:05): Have you seen a kind of real evolution in the kind of articles submitted to your journal? That is, do you see many more multi-media projects?

Liu: On the whole I’d have to say “No.” Obviously there has been some of that, and there are journals like Vectors that have emerged recently and have tried to promote that kind of thinking. But it’s really quite amazing that the profession as a whole has been pretty conservative and resistant to the sorts of things that you can now do and that I think would be wonderful if more people did, and that I’d really like to see. I love to see stuff like that come into the journal more often.

It does appear but for people to be doing serious thinking and scholarship in a new mode, that simply takes a lot more than I guess 10 or 15 years to actually happen. It does happen, but ask yourself when was the last time you’ve written an essay that requires the new technology in a way that couldn’t be done in a print journal.

Computer as Symbol and Model: On reading Alan Liu

I’ve now had a chance to read Alan Liu’s essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” (PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423) and have some thoughts about the way he stages computing. In this post I want to follow the outer edges of his argument in an effort to situate myself in his discursive field.

Let’s start with this early passage (p. 410):

For the humanities, the digital humanities exceed (though they include) the functional role of instrument or service, the pioneer role of innovator, the ensemble role of an “additional field,” and even such faux-political roles assigned to new fields as challenger, reformer, and (less positively) fifth column. This is because the digital humanities also have a symbolic role. In both their promise and their threat, the digital humanities serve as a shadow play for a future form of the humanities that wishes to include what contemporary society values about the digital without losing its soul to other domains of knowledge work that have gone digital to stake their claim to that society.

I think that’s right. I also think that assigning the digital humanities a symbolic role is a clever and crucial bit of staging, for it places digital humanities at the distance Liu needs to treat them as an object requiring interpretation. And interpretation has been the central activity of literary studies for the last half-century or so. We know how to interpret things.

But I want to narrow the scope a little. What interests me is not the digital humanities as symbol, but the computer and computing and, I would suggest, that’s what all but consumes Liu’s attention in this essay. The computer as symbol is quite familiar to many humanists, for computers, robots, and other artificial beings figure centrally in many of the texts we examine. There the computer generally functions as an Other, often malevolent.

Liu wisely chooses to ground his inquiry in a specific example, Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac’s A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method (May 2012, 68 page PDF), which I’ve previously discussed on New Savanna, From Telling to Showing, by the Numbers. There are two reasons he chose this paper. In the first place, it is methodologically sophisticated, state of the art as they say. Second, Heuser and Le-Khac arrive at a tentative conclusion about those 2958 texts that is meaningful in traditional humanistic terms, terms argued by Raymond Williams. That allows Liu to examine just how they were able to wrestle meaning from a computer.

Meaning of the Digital Humanities - Alan Liu

Delivered  May 1, 2013 at NYU. Starting around 50 minutes in, Liu has some interesting observations on the appearance of abstract and concrete terms.

See this entry at Liu's blog where you find this preview (taken from a PMLA essay covering the same material: “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities.” PMLA 128 (2013): 409-23. ):

Yet even if we were to complete our hypothetical ethnographer’s chart [of the digital humanities], it would not adequately explain the digital humanities. This is because we would leave unexplained the relation of the digital humanities to the humanities generally. My thesis is that an understanding of the digital humanities can only rise to the level of an explanation if we see that the underlying issue is the disciplinary identity not of the digital humanities but of the humanities themselves. For the humanities, the digital humanities exceed (though they include) the functional role of instrument or service, the pioneer role of innovator, the ensemble role of an “additional field,” and even such faux-political roles assigned to new fields as challenger, reformer, and (less positively) fifth column.

This is because the digital humanities also have a symbolic role. In both their promise and their threat, the digital humanities serve as a shadow play for a future form of the humanities that wishes to include what people value about the digital without losing its soul to other domains of knowledge work that have gone digital to stake their claim to contemporary society. Or, precisely because the digital humanities are both functional and symbolic, a better metaphor would be something like the register in a computer’s central processor unit, where values stored in deep memory are loaded for rapid shuffling, manipulation, and testing–in this case, to try out new humanistic disciplinary identities evolved for today’s broader contention of knowledges and knowledge workers.

The question of the meaning of the digital humanities best opens such an argument to view because it registers both a specific problem in the digital humanities and the larger crisis of the meaningfulness of today’s humanities.