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.
This option causes Clawson’s package to place ending punctuation outside
quotation marks, among other possible effects.
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. To apprehend it you
will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history,
and secular history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen,
but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth—I know I presume—you
must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of
certain molecules—it is they after all which dictate temperatures,
pressures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers…2
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 am teaching this class because our
department’s primary Victorianist has recently become the director of
our graduate program and thus was unable to teach a course in her normal
rotation. The texts that I assigned were Villette, Bleak
House, Lady Audley’s Secret, Daniel Deronda, Jude
the Obscure, and Dracula. (That’s about 3500 pp. of reading,
which I’m now thinking might have been a bit much.) Since I have never
taught any of these texts before, I have read as much scholarship on
them as possible for preparation. I estimate that I’ve read at least
twenty articles or book chapters per book. Nothing I have encountered in
my seventeen years in the profession has led me to believe that there’s
anything unusual about this. Professors routinely consult scholarship in
preparation for their teaching, including many sources they will never
cite in their own scholarship. There are several reasons for this: 1)
most people who teach in humanities departments do not publish very much
in absolute terms, so they will not be citation-providers. 2) People who
do publish scholarship have, most of the time, to teach a wide variety
of things that do not have anything to do with their scholarship, yet
they read it to prepare. (I’m aware that there are a small number of
professors who have not read anything new in x amount of years, but this
is mostly a stereotype rarely met in sublunary lands.) 3) Scholars read
many things in their research that informs their understanding of their
subject that they do not eventually cite.
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.js. Solutions that involved
pre-processing the data the way that I did for the sliders didn’t seem
to be very useful for this problem.
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. Not all the journals are represented equally in the database.
The following graph shows their distribution:
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.
It works, however, and I don’t think it’s terribly cumbersome.
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). Right now digital
humanists seem to be dividing into camps of Beliebers and
nonBeliebers, and I’m less inclined to blame any of the people
involved — or any structure of ideas, or system of peer review — than
I am to suspect that the logic of Twitter itself encourages the
formation of “teams.”
I wrote acouple 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.