Household Opera

Fun with Google Books Ngram Viewer

When Google's Ngram Viewer appeared on the scene last month, I (like half my Twitter feed) went a little crazy feeding search terms into it and looking at the results. For any of you who missed the news, the viewer lets you search language corpora generated from Google Books and display a chart of the frequencies of search terms displayed over time. Dan Cohen has a good post on it, in which he concludes (and I agree): "Digital humanities needs gateway drugs. Kudos to the pushers on the Google Books team."

Given Google Books' well-known metadata issues and the inevitability of OCR errors in the data, I wouldn't use the Ngram Viewer to make any substantial claims yet.* I don't think it's reliable enough to use as evidence. But I do suspect this is the first incarnation of the kind of tool that we'll be seeing a lot more of, hopefully in more sophisticated versions backed up by corpora with more reliable date and publication metadata, and with more features for access to the corpora themselves.

And in the meantime, I still find it well-nigh irresistible. Consider the first Ngram I generated, a chart comparing the usage of "scrapbook" and "commonplace book" in the 19th and early 20th centuries:

Thanks to my background research on the commonplace book project, I already knew that "scrapbooking" (as we now call it) took off in the mid-19th century and eventually became a more popular pastime than the keeping of commonplace books; the graph suggests something of the rise of one format and the fall of the other. 

Or here's another one for Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti:

I like how you can see Christina Rossetti's reputation start to overshadow her brother's in the early years of the 20th century, but they still track together throughout the subsequent decades.

So: it's not a perfect tool, it's not as transparent as one would like, and ideally it should lead to questions we don't already know the answers to, like my commonplace vs. scrapbook search above—but I'll be very curious to see what develops out of it in a few years' time.

Incidentally, there's now an Ngrams Tumblr blog, with an ever-growing collection of examples, some serious, some charmingly silly (like "new kids on the block" vs. "New Kids on the Block": oh no, 80s flashback!).

* Geoffrey Nunberg, who wrote the piece on Google Books metadata that I linked above, also wrote a thoughtful article of the Ngram viewer and the kinds of scholarship it might lead to. Well worth reading, especially for its cautions about the limitations of the tools as they currently stand.

The past is a foreign country; they write poems differently there.

My Material Cultures paper is coming together at last, with a little over a month and a half to go before I present it. I suspect a lot of the points I'm making have been made at least once or twice before, but I'm working with a body of evidence that doesn't seem to have been examined in a lot of detail, and I have so much to say about it that I'm going to have a hard time cramming it all into 20 minutes. There are so many more commonplace books I want to look at that I think this could very easily become an extended project of some sort: perhaps a journal article, or if I get wildly ambitious, I'd still like to build a database to track the reputations of individual poets and poems among Victorian readers.*

One of the things I've been realizing, as I pore over extract books from various points in the 19th century, is how different my own literary tastes are from those of the people I'm studying. One finds Familiar Canonical Poets in these commonplace books, of course. Shakespeare turns up regularly, mostly in the form of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations-style snippets from the plays; Byron was wildly popular, much more so than his fellow Romantic poets; the most famous 19th-century Americans—Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant—are heavily represented as well.

But one also finds dozens of now-obscure poets, not to mention reams of poetry that strikes the modern ear as sentimental, even treacly. The poems in these collections tend to be heavy on the moralizing, or on the kind of pathos that Mark Twain sent up so vividly in the person of Emmeline Grangerford. I've paged through entire albums filled with sad poems about dead children, pious poems about Christian resignation, and upbeat love songs. One can resuscitate the reputation of a Felicia Hemans or a Letitia Elizabeth Landon; but it's harder to do that with Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House (quoted seven times in one Boston woman's extract book), especially after reading what Virginia Woolf had to say about it.

On my most recent visit to Brown I encountered a poem by Edward Augustus Rand, an Episcopalian minister born in Vermont, which began:

Across the sands, strange darkness fell;
The sun had dipped beneath a cloud;
The waves now sullenly swept on,
The surf fast whitened to a shroud.

But then the speaker sees a sunlit white sail in the distance, and neatly unpacks the metaphor to conclude with "O souls that find in Christ the light, / Sail on across life's shadowed sea!" I rather liked the ominous first stanza, but I felt a distinct flash of disappointment when I saw how it ended. The combination of religiosity and sunny optimism was off-putting to my tastes, which were honed, like every other English major's tastes, on the irony and disjunctiveness and unsettlement of Modernism and its aftermath. This kind of poetry is exactly what 20th century literary culture revolted against.

But people clearly loved this kind of poetry—cut it out of newspapers, saved it in their albums and scrapbooks, copied it out by hand, shared it with each other, kept their compilations and passed them on to friends and relatives. And one of the things I'm interested in is getting past my own aesthetic prejudices, which are very much of my own time and place, to try to understand what the Victorians saw in their (rather different) canon.** There's something moving about all the effort so many people went through to preserve these poems; staying aware of that has been a useful corrective to my own literary snobbery.

Take, for instance, Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life," which was much beloved by Victorian readers but is apt to sound almost unbearably earnest nowadays. Not long ago, I found one of its most famous stanzas emblazoned on a vintage postcard from around 1913:

One's first impulse may be to roll one's eyes; but the fact that postcard companies could print poems like this on cards and sell them is yet another piece of evidence for their popularity. And the appetite for reassuring, uplifting, optimistic poetry hasn't gone away. I used to see "A Psalm of Life" quite regularly on the backs of Celestial Seasonings tea boxes, before they stopped putting entire poems on their packaging. (I could probably do an entire spinoff project on the detachable poetic quotation as it appears on various types of commercial products. But I have to finish this stage of the project first.)

Most of this won't fit in the paper, which is less concerned with aesthetics than with reading practices and with the physical construction of homemade texts, although I do plan to sneak that postcard into my slides. But I wanted to share it anyway, because it seemed to interesting not to think through.

* It would be an enormous amount of work, and there would be all sorts of logistical challenges, but I still think it would be a very cool project. Had I but world enough and time, &c.

** Joanne Dobson's "Reclaiming Sentimental Literature" (American Literature 69 no. 2, 1997) says a lot of what I'd like to say about the mismatch between 19th-century poetry and 20th-century aesthetic sensibilities.

The Slow Food approach to scholarship

Reading Anthony Grafton's recent NYRB blog post on the impact of budget cuts on British universities (and especially the paleography program at King's College London), I was struck by the following paragraph:

There was a Slow Food feel to British university life, based on a consensus that people should take the time to make an article or a book as dense and rich as it could be. Good American universities were never exactly Fast Food Nation, but we certainly felt the pressure to produce, regularly and rapidly. By contrast, Michael Baxandall spent three years at the Warburg Institute, working in the photographic collection and not completing a dissertation, and several more as a lecturer, later on, writing only a few articles. Then, in 1971 and 1972, he produced two brilliant interdisciplinary books, which transformed the study of Renaissance humanism and art, remain standard works to this day, and were only the beginning of a great career. Gertrud Bing, E.H. Gombrich, J.B. Trapp, and A.M. Meyer, who administered the Warburg in those days, knew how to be patient. Their results speak for themselves.

If American universities weren't Fast Food Nation then, they are now, in the age of massive and permanent adjunctification. Anyone who's been reading this blog for a while knows how cynical I've become about the likelihood of any change in the situation; it's disheartening to think of universities elsewhere going the same way.

The thing is, I passionately believe in the Slow Food approach to scholarship. I believe in taking as long as the project needs. I believe in not rushing to publish every half-baked idea.* I believe quality trumps quantity. I believe in patience. I believe the two-books-for-tenure requirement (or whatever it is now) is a formula for a deluge of mediocre monographs, and this benefits no one in the end. I believe in the sheer pleasure of discovering things, of deep and thoughtful and playful conversation about ideas. And I believe in unprofitable, obscure areas of knowledge, the more impractical the better. Poetry makes nothing happen, after all. Not every human endeavor is or should be about raking in the funding as fast as we possibly can.

I would love to start a Slow Scholarship movement, dedicated to the pursuit of intellectual discovery under unhurried and convivial conditions.** But the eternal question is: how do people who have to pay the rent and the utility bills manage this sort of thing? Whether one is an independent scholar with a day job, or a faculty member trying to squeeze out X books and Y articles while serving on Z committees and grading N papers (where N = some number always greater than time allows), there just aren't enough hours in the day, either for slow unhurried thinking or for long thoughtful conversations with one's (equally rushed) colleagues—or for the preparation of amazing Slow Food dinners every night, for that matter. When people complain about the perceived elitism of the Slow Food movement, one of the things they're objecting to is the amount of leisure time it requires, which just plain isn't available to most of us.*** And I most certainly don't want scholarship to be feasible only for people with the luxury of a lot of spare time.

I don't think it would be impossible to wave the flag for Slow Scholarship; I just wish I had some idea how to make it happen. At this point, I seriously doubt academia will change itself. Reader, do you have any ideas?

* Except, of course, if one is blogging. Although my own current blogging pace is far more Slow than Fast, due more to laziness than to anything else, I'm afraid.

** After a bit of Googling, I see that Lindsay Waters called for something similar a couple of years ago. I don't think academic publishers will necessarily change things by updating their standards, though. The problem is not just mediocre writing; it's mediocre writing that people have to churn out in ever-increasing quantities in order to compete for an ever-dwindling pool of tenured positions.

*** I also want a Slow Life movement. Down with the expectation that everyone must work 60+-hour weeks to be considered successful! Up with having time to dream or think or explore or cook or stand and stare!

Writing projects: update and non-update

So. Instead of being Insanely Productive Writing Month, November has turned into a cage match between my NoNaShoStoWriMo story and my embryonic Material Cultures paper project. The latter has been winning; the former is stalled out and sitting forlornly on my hard drive, waiting for a month when I can give it my undivided attention. It's been a long time since I wrote fiction, and I've gotten self-conscious about it, too aware of when I'm veering into genre cliche, too worried about the depth of my characters and whether certain plot elements are overly contrived. It was more fun when I was a teenager and would have an idea for a story and just write it without fretting over it. Just sign me up for my "I Never Finish Anyth" t-shirt.

On the other hand, the paper proposal has led to a couple of really, really interesting trips to the John Hay Library at Brown University, and to a collection of 19th-century American poetry anthologies and verse commonplace books of which I've barely scratched the surface, but I've already found the makings of a fantastic project. Months ago I started thinking about the anthologization of minor poets, and then earlier this fall it occurred to me that it would be useful to have some actual data about which poems appeared in which anthologies, and when. Maybe, I thought (flashing back to data modeling and entity relations diagramming from my first year in library school), I could start building a database to track the movement of poems from one anthology to another and the rise and fall of poets' reputations.

I soon realized that the database side of the project would be massively labor-intensive, though I still want to do it. Preliminary WorldCat searches turned up tons and tons of forgotten anthologies, many of them geared toward classroom memorization and recitation. At which point I remembered that I'd written a bit about memorization practices in 19th-century America in the coda to my dissertation, and I started wondering if there were differences between the poets most often memorized and the poets most often featured in other kinds of anthologies. At the same point I also discovered that the Hay Library's Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays includes a huge collection of 19th-century poetry anthologies. And off I went on the train to Providence, an hour or so away, delighted that I could actually research this so close to home.

On my first visit, I noticed that quite a few anthologies were constructed more along the lines of the commonplace book than what we think of as the standard anthology format. "Hmm," I thought, "I'm interested in commonplace books too. I wonder if there are any here?" And sure enough, there turned out to be a big, endlessly interesting collection of 19th-century New England commonplace books as well.

So now my project involves comparing the formats and content of commonplace books and anthologies, with a focus on poetry; I'm going to argue that each of these types of collections reflected the other.* And I'll probably tie it back to my earlier research on memory, because stocking one's memory with useful quotations and worthy sentiments is a constantly recurring theme among the anthologists. And, if you can't tell already, I'm really excited. Here's hoping this project won't turn into another for the Never Finish Anyth Archive!

* I found an absolutely amazing manuscript poetry collection complete with an introduction (with copied-out quotations on the power of poetry) and an alphabetical title index. And another, apparently by a Harvard student, with cut-out engravings pasted onto the front and back endpapers and a section of poems by "Professor Longfellow." And another in a beautiful copperplate hand with lots of little decorative rulings and flourishes (and the occasional manicle) after each poem. And another with an index of first lines. And that was just on the first visit!

On trying to get some research done, or, Revenge of the zombies

Every research project I've ever undertaken (of the kind intended to lead to something publishable, anyway) has tended to fall into a distinct series of stages. It goes more or less like this:

1) Initial idea, followed by exhilaration as several interesting data points and/or previous ideas and/or previous research investigations dovetail in an unexpected way. Glee. Maybe even some jumping up and down.

2) Initial research. Hey, not too many people have written about this already! Maybe I've got a shot!

3) Oh no. Someone else has already written the exact thing I wanted to write. Well, bugger.

4) Renewed determination. Surely I can contribute something to the discussion? Renewed research along previously uninvestigated avenues.

5) Discovery of less obvious questions still worth asking. Cautious optimism.

6) Masses of further research.

7) Writing.

8) Procrastination.

9 through 11) Repeat 6 through 8, in whatever order, as necessary. Somewhere in there, discovery that there really is an argument to be made, after all.

12) Finishing the thing and sending it off.

I'm working on a conference paper proposal due at the end of next month, and I'm still at 4, which bugs me because I was hoping to be at least at 5 or 6 by now. On the other hand, I'm off to Providence this weekend to do some digging in the special collections library at Brown, which I'm hoping will at least start to get me there. In the meantime, I'm fighting off a particularly fierce attack of impostor syndrome. ("It's not your field!" says my brain. "What makes you think that a bit of library school coursework in book history and a Ph.D in the literature of a different country and time period make you qualified to talk about 19th-century American poetry anthology publishing? Even if it's accepted, you'll be unmasked as soon as the Q&A starts!" "Shut up," I say to my brain. "I'm trying to figure something out here, and you're not helping." "But it's not your field!" my brain shrieks again. Repeat several times over. Stupid brain.)

I used to feel like this when I writing my dissertation. The difference between then and now is that now, my future livelihood and professional identity don't depend on my pulling this project together. The only things at stake now are an interesting conference travel opportunity, a nice extra line on my CV, and, even if the conference opportunity doesn't work out, a fun side project to work on, which in turn means less sitting around wondering vaguely whether I shouldn't be doing something more interesting with my spare time.

So why is the zombified corpse of my grad-school-era neurosis still staggering around? Do I have to break out the flamethrowers and chainsaws to make it stop, or what? Any suggestions on zombie-slaying would be greatly appreciated, from those of you who've tackled this type of zombie before.

In which an extracurricular project coalesces

Remember that idea I had for a project dealing with Dracula and information technology some months back? I think it may turn into an actual article, or at least the makings of one. I'd been thinking, over the winter break, about which of my various research ideas (some library-related, some more literary, some, like this one, in-between) that I might want to pursue in the new year, and the Dracula project suddenly started calling to me. I've been using some of the downtime before spring semester starts to pull together a bibliography, and I'm rereading the novel with a steadily increasing level of interest in what it has to say about documents and their circulation.

What's intriguing me right now is the parallel between Dracula's self-replication (by making more and more vampires) and the replication of documents by everyone else (by copying, transcribing, and typing out in triplicate). Dracula himself is a sort of oral register of Transylvanian history. The very last paragraphs of the novel call attention to the scarcity of "authentic" documents, e.g. handwritten ones, among the fictional archive of records out of which Jonathan Harker claims to have assembled the narrative. Lots of people turn out to have already written about Dracula and the telegraph, the phonograph, and other communication technologies of the 19th century, but I think there's something I can add.

I keep having to remind myself that even though I'm not by training a Victorianist, the great advantages of being an independent scholar are not having to produce at the speed of the tenure clock (and hence more time for research into new subject areas) and being able to work on whatever one wants to. If something good enough to publish or present comes out of it, I'll be very pleased; but it's also a nifty project that unites a bunch of things I'm interested in—history of the book, technologies of writing, supernatural literature—but haven't really had a chance to write about yet. It may take a while to finish, but I'm remembering just how much fun a good research jag can be.

Current awareness needs to get more...current.

Now that faculty outreach and collection development for English and American literature are officially part of my job description, I've been making an effort to stay more up-to-date with the field. I'm scanning a much bigger field than I used to when I was a grad student in English, though, and I have fewer hours in the day to scan it in. Gone are the days when I could spend hours combing through the MLA Bibliography to find everything ever written in my sub-sub-specialty. Instead, I'm using as many shorcuts as possible. I've got RSS feeds to notify me when new journal issues come out, and when new books in relevant subject areas are published. I read blogs. I skim tables of contents and keep a running file of topics that scholars are currently working on. The start of a new semester reminds me to look over the course list for the English department and see if there are areas where I need to think about developing the collection. And so on.

I've also realized that I've come to expect certain tools to be available as part of my current awareness repertoire, and to work well. It strikes me as odd when journals don't have RSS feeds for new issues. I roll my eyes at databases that only offer email alerts, because come on, it's the 21st century—who needs more email when there are other tools that work better? I'm surprised at any online scholarly resource that expects me to bookmark it and check back frequently for updates. It's not like the technology to simplify the current awareness process is new, after all. Or obscure. Or hard to implement.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided it would be useful to have the University of Pennsylvania Calls for Papers mailing list on my radar again, after being unsubscribed for at least the last four years. But it's no longer even a mailing list; it's now a web-only archive. Without anything resembling an RSS feed. I tried to kluge together a homemade RSS feed, using first Page2RSS and then Feedity, but with no luck. The CFP announcements are divided up among separate pages for different fields, so one would have to set up individual feeds for each page (and get lots of redundant results, because they cross-post a lot of the multidisciplinary calls for papers). I futzed around with Yahoo! Pipes for a while, trying to combine multiple feeds and de-duplicate the repeated announcements. But something about the way the CFP pages are set up confuses both Page2RSS and Feedity such that they can't tell which announcements are new. At which point I gave up because it was becoming too much of a time-sink even for me.

So, basically, there's no way to monitor the Calls for Papers archive except by revisiting the site, page by page, whenever I manage to remember to do so. As the kids today say: EPIC FAIL.

Not long after I abandoned Project Roll My Own CFP Feed, I learned from a friend on Twitter that there won't be any internet access at all at the upcoming MLA convention. Which, in this day and age, is even more of an epic fail. I'm thinking, not at all for the first time, that the humanities badly need an influx of hackers, programmers, and tinkerers.*

* The nice thing about my current career path is that I can say this kind of thing and people nod in agreement and suggest nifty solutions I hadn't heard of before, instead of looking at me askance like they're wondering why I care so much about this newfangled interweb contraption.

Article idea: scholarly social network mapping

Several days ago I had an idea for an article: a study of humanities scholars' social and professional networks, using names mentioned in the acknowledgments sections of scholarly monographs. If you assembled enough data, I bet you could build a network graph, and if you had some way of representing people's areas of specialization, you could start to map the way various fields overlap and intersect. And then you could use that information to think about any number of library-oriented questions -- the nature of scholarly communication, the "invisible college" phenomenon, how to tap existing networks to do outreach, and so on. It would be a bit like doing a citation study, but more geared toward finding out the less obvious connections, i.e. who helped a book get written as opposed to who gets directly cited in footnotes.

My main concern is about the ethics of aggregating and publishing this kind of information, even though all of it would already be publicly available. Even though it's common knowledge, in theory, that X thanks Y in her acknowledgments, it's not quite the same to put together a big pool of data showing X's connections to Y (and Z, and W, and A and B) all in one place. Collegial relationships often shade over into personal friendships, and it feels a bit intrusive to map those connections. Could one anonymize the information, somehow, and just label everyone with letters of the alphabet or something else neutral, and only identify their research specialty? It would probably mean more work, but I'm still thinking it would make a really interesting project.

So, O blogosphere, is this a viable idea, do you think? And if it turns out to be, would anyone be interested in co-authoring?