Kieran Healy posted last year about “sleeping beauties” in philosophy—papers that went several years before receiving any citations but that ended up accumulating many. This pattern is unusual, as most papers receive a good amount of citations immediately and continue to do so (or the opposite). I think literary studies and history is less paper-driven than philosophy, and I would encourage everyone to read this for more context on citations in the humanities.
What Happens
Let me first attempt to explain the plot of Upstream Color, Shane Carruth’s second film. An entrepreneur has discovered that the worms who live in a certain orchid’s root matter have psychogenic properties. In particular, if ingested they induce a hypnotic state in which the subject is amenable to all suggestion. Teens are used for pharmacological testing, in apparent violation of many FDA regulations. The drug is manufactured first in pill form and distributed by the entrepreneur (referred to in the credits merely as “Thief”) in a night club, though the film does not reveal any flunitrazepam-like use. The drug itself is perhaps more like an empathic than a hypnotic, if empathy could be extended to complete subjugation to another’s will. This part of the R&D process is confusing, because subsequent events reveal that perhaps a dozen people have been given the worm, and the timing of the initial scene makes it appear as if our protagonist Kris is first in line. She might be, given how much time passes between her drugging and her meeting Shane Carruth’s character Jeff; but I imagined that it happened to him first for some reason. Given that he has much more in the way of financial resources, perhaps the Thief worked his way up the socioeconomic ladder.
About five years ago, I swore that I would finish Rhem 4 without hints. Though I haven’t been trying the whole time, I worked on it quite hard over the last week or so. I failed, yes. I’m going to take this opportunity to brag about what I solved without hints and complain about the two puzzles that I didn’t.
First, the complaining, as suits my nature. After finishing the game, I read through some reviews, walkthroughs, etc., and I was satisfied to find that most of them mentioned one of these puzzles as being exceptionally difficult, though not for the reason that I found. The first puzzle I was stuck on, more than five years ago, involved what one deservedly forgotten Neoplatonist called the “shadows of the spheres.” What was bad about it, from my admittedly fair and judicious perspective, is that it was far from clear in the rendering which were the vampires. That ambiguity, combined with the (logical) finishing permutation, made the puzzle unsolvable. Since I couldn’t be sure which ones were the vampires, you see, I never would have gotten to the stage where I contemplated the permutations. If the rendering had been clear, I would have.
Since I wrote my last set of directions for creating a topic-browser from the “Genre-specific wordcounts for 178,381 volumes from the HathiTrust Digital Library”, Andrew Goldstone updated his dfrtopics package to make it easier to use for this purpose. I haven’t completely rewritten the post, though where his instructions conflict with mine (using R instead of dropping into perl for ligature substitution, for example), his solution is both more elegant and more technically reliable.
The “Word Frequencies in English-Language Literature, 1700-1922” data set from the HathiTrust digital library was released last month. (See Ted Underwood’s post for more detail.) It contains word-frequency lists of texts from the digitized HathiTrust collection published between 1700-1922 that are divided into fiction, poetry, and drama. (A description of the method used to classify the documents can be found here.)
There are many approaches to exploring this data. What I’m going to describe is building a topic browser of a model created with LDA. I’ll be using slightly modified versions of Andrew Goldstone’s dfrtopics and dfr-browser. (See this post for more detail on Goldstone’s powerful, flexible, and well-documented package.) This browser is a wonderfully detailed interactive topic-model visualization: for examples of it being used to visualize models created from JSTOR’s Data for Research, see Signs, seven literary studies journals, and the Journal of Modern Literature.
Who doesn’t like an inferred apocalypse?* Maybe you remember the theory of The Sopranos’s ending that proposed Tony, Carmela, children, onion rings, and Members Only all were evaporated by a nuclear bomb that Tony had inadvertently helped smuggle into the country. In Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Purity, there’s a seemingly absurd sub-plot involving a cartel attempting to steal a nuclear bomb with the aid of a drug-dealing nuclear supervisor. The plot fails because he trips and severs an artery after the tequila bottle he’s carrying shatters on the pavement. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to gauge how likely that is. It pleased me somehow to think that the happy ending, with Purity “Pip” Tyler securing her inheritance and the love of a young man who wants to revolutionize the teaching of statistics, would soon turn into a post-apocalyptic nightmare after another stolen bomb was detonated. I mean, why bring it up?
The Current Situation
Around last year at this time, I became interested in what the archived editions of the MLA Job Information List could tell us about how the profession has changed over time. The MLA provided page-scans of all the JILs going back to 1965, and Jim Ridolfo used commercial OCR software to make them searchable. Once the documents were searchable, finding the first occurrence of various key words and graphing their frequency over time became feasible. One detail that became clear to me as I read each single issue of the JIL was that the formats differed enough to make graphs of relative frequencies somewhat misleading. Some of the editions are three times the size of others, and even normalizing over years doesn’t necessarily help here. So this image, for example, of the relative frequency of “shakespeare” in the JIL, needs additional interpretation:
There’s a line in R. A. Lafferty’s “The Primary Education of the Camiroi” about personality and politics: “Can you imagine a person so sick that he would actually desire to hold high office for any great period of time?” A familiar observation, I think, and one that came to mind as I was reading James Risen’s Pay Any Price. The Camiroi of Lafferty’s story have a comically rigorous educational system and govern themselves by lottery (for short intervals). There are nine chapters in Risen’s book, with each one describing a disastrous consequence of the post-2001 expansion of the state security apparatus. The last third of the book discusses the NSA domestic surveillance program, and it made me wonder what type of people would seek high office in a state of universal surveillance and thus blackmailability. The best? The worst? The most oblivious? I have an opinion, but let us speak of higher things.
It takes me a while to get to the latest films nowadays. I thus missed out on a lot of the excitement generated by Snowpiercer. The lively premise is that an ever-running train circumnavigates a world frozen by atmospheric particulates. These were dispersed into the sky to mitigate global warming. Consequences were not anticipated, and apparently all other life has become extinct.1 The train was built by an excellent man, a man of vision. Successful businessmen are like this. They cannot tolerate the enforced mediocrity of bureaucracies. Most fail, but those that succeed push us forward into a new tomorrow. . .
Inspired by (or directly ripping off, depending on how you want to phrase it) Kieran Healy’s post about migrating to Hugo, I have decided to do the same. Like Healy, I was frustrated with the build times of Octopress, and a somewhat inconvenient wine spill had made recovering my Octopress installation a little bit more difficult than it was worth.
I have essentially used Healy’s modifications to the Hyde theme, with a few small tweaks here and there. I also use the Emacs Starter Kit for Social Sciences, which I’m slowly developing into a Humanist Starter Kit. I can’t say that things went exactly smoothly, largely because I had abandoned using categories in wordpress many years ago, and I was determined to add them in a useful way to this new site. That took quite some time, and I have not been able to make redirects consistently from the old wordpress id system. I hope that the Categories page will help you find anything that might not be working from an old link.