I realize this advice may only be relevant to a few souls in this degraded world, but I wanted to document an issue I had when using the org-mode LaTeX exporter with biblatex and James Clawson’s MLA style package.
My template automatically exports babel as one of the LaTeX headers when exporting from org. If the default language is set as “en,” the org exporter will append “,english” as a babel option.
“The Real Nature of Control”
The last text I assigned in my recent “Modernism, Fascism, and Sexuality” seminar was Gravity’s Rainbow.1 Among its many oddities is a scene where the spirit of Walther Rathenau is summoned through a medium for the entertainment and mockery of an elite “corporate Nazi crowd”:
These signs are real. They are also the symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure.
Two stories caught my attention yesterday. The first was a review of some recent studies of citation practices by field, broadly considered. The claim that alarmed a number of people on twitter was that “82%” of humanities scholarship was never cited. I pointed out that it was a mistake to assume that “never cited” means “never read.” That someone would even make this inference is quite mysterious to me. Let me explain: this semester, I have been teaching, for the first time, a course on the Victorian novel.
I don’t remember exactly when the MLA digitized all of the issues of the Job Information List, but I was excited about what these documents could tell us about institutional history, the job market, salary trends, and many other things. The PDFs hosted by MLA are image scans, however, which are not immediately searchable as plain text. A variety of OCR solutions are available, but I personally was too lazy to attempt to use any of them.
Modernism/modernity is an important and relatively new journal (1994-) that publishes interdisciplinary work in modernist studies. Though I’ve never submitted an article to it (I did publish a book review there), I’ve long heard that it is very difficult to publish in. The last time I checked, the journal did not submit acceptance statistics to the MLA Directory of Periodicals (these statistics make for interesting reading if you’ve never looked at them, by the way).
A problem that many of the co-citation graphs I discussed in the last post share is that they are too dense to be easily readable. I created the sliders as a way of alleviating this problem, but some of the data sets are too dense at any citation-threshold. Being able to view only one of the communities at a time seemed like a plausible solution, but I was far from sure how to implement it using d3.
I’ve created several new co-citation graphs recently. While I enjoy looking at the visualizations, I haven’t yet analyzed any of them thoroughly. The film studies network was intriguing to me for several reasons, and I’m going to explore it now in more detail.
I downloaded just over 12K articles from various film studies journals in Web of Science. The journals are Sight and Sound; Film Comment; Literature/Film Quarterly; American Film; Cinema Journal; Screen; Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television; Journal of Popular Film & Television; Wide Angle; Film Quarterly; Journal of Film and Video; Film Criticism; and Quarterly Review of Film & Video.
I’ve written here and here about creating co-citation networks in D3 from Web of Science data. My first experiment, described above, was creating a threshold slider. I next wanted to try to create a chronological slider that would allow you to adjust the dates of the citations in the network.
There are doubtless many ways of going about doing this, and I’m reasonably sure that the method I’m going to describe is far from ideal.
Ted Underwood made the following comment on Scott Weingart’s post about a recent controversy with the Journal of Digital Humanities:
I can also imagine framing the issue, for instance, as a question about the way power tends to be exercised in a one-to-many social medium. I don’t know many academic fields that rely on Twitter as heavily as DH does. It certainly has as much power in the field as JDH (which, frankly, is not a high-profile journal).
I wrote a couple of Breaking Bad commentaries last year after the end of the first part of the fifth season. There are now only four episodes left, and I’m not entirely sure if we’ll see anything else about Gustavo Fring’s past. I can see how the Lydia-plot could have a flashback with Fring, but I don’t see how it could get all the way back to Chile. And that’s a shame if true, because I think there’s some really useful political comparisons to be made between Walter White’s and Fring’s respective formative circumstances and economic policies.