Course Schedule
Note: Your syllabus is a valuable reference document that you should regularly consult. It will be your map for the course. In it, you will find all policies, all major assignments, and a schedule of readings. Our readings are subject to change based on our interests as a class.
Week 1: Introductions
Mon 1/24 What is the data of literary studies?
- Short excerpt from Edith Rickert, New Methods for the Study of Literature (1927) Canvas PDF
Wed 1/26: Histories of Literary Studies
- Read: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s One (1929) [111 pgs]
- Optional reading:
- James F. English and Ted Underwood, “Shifting Scales: Between Literature and Social Science,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 (September 1, 2016): 277–95. [Canvas PDF]
- Antoinette Burton, “Archive Stories: Gender in the Making of Imperial and Colonial Histories,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (2004) [Canvas PDF]
- Due: Research Exercise 1: Introduction to programming
Week 2: Sociology of Forms
Mon 1/31: What is the “sociology of culture”?
- Read: Raymond Williams, “Literature,” “Traditions, Institutions, and Formations,” “Structures of Feeling,” “The Sociology of Culture,” “Forms,” from Marxism and Literature (1977) [Canvas PDF]
- Read: Pierre Bourdieu, “Appendix 1” (pages 35-36), “Flaubert, Analyst of Flaubert” and “The Market for Symbolic Goods,” (pages 141-173)The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1994) [Canvas PDF - please only read required sections ]
- Optional reading:
- Pages 214-218 of Robert Darnton, “Reading, Writing, and Publishing in Eighteenth-Century France: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature” (1971) Canvas PDF
Wed 2/2 The Data of Literary History
- Read: Ted Underwood, Preface and “Do We Understand the Outlines of Literary History,” Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (2019) [Canvas PDF]
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Due: Research Exercise 2 cloud version -
Practicum: Getting set up with computational analysis cloud version
Week 3: Authors and the Literary Field
Mon 2/7
- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey ([1803]; 1818)
- Browse:
- facsimiles of Austen novel title pages [Canvas folder]
- Optional: Broadview appendix (includes Austen’s correspondence with publishers, samples of Catherine Morland’s reading materials, and reviews of Northanger Abbey) [Canvas PDF]
- titles from eighteenth-century fiction Early Novels Digital Collection
- Deidre Lynch, excerpts from “At Home with Austen” [on the Austen industry] [Canvas PDF]
Wed 2/9
- Read: Gaye Tuchman, “Gender Segregation and the Politics of Culture,” and Appendices A, B, C from Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change (1988) [Canvas PDF]
- Optional reading:
- J. F. Burrows, Introduction and “A Set of Pronouns,” Computation Into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Method (1987) [Canvas PDFs]
- Marilyn Butler, “Jane Austen’s Word Process,” London Review of Books, June 25, 1987 [review of Burrows’ book] [Canvas PDF]
- Due: Research Exercise 3
- Practicum: Counting and descriptive statistics
Week 4: Readers, Reception
Mon 2/14
- Read: Wilkie Collins, “The Unknown Public” Household Words (1858) [Canvas PDF]
- Read: Q.D. Leavis, Preface, Introduction (pages xiii-xvi), and Part I (pages 3-80) from Fiction and the Reading Public (1939) [Canvas PDF–only read assigned sections!]
- Optional reading:
- Jonathan Rose, three short chapters: “A Preface to a History of Audiences,” “Welsh Miner’s Libraries,” and “A Mongrel Library”The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class (2001) Canvas PDF
Wed 2/16
- Read: Caroline Bressey, “Black Victorians and Anti-Caste: Mapping the Geographies of ‘Missing’ Readers,” in Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience, ed. Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini, (2016),pp 75–92. [Canvas PDF]
- Optional: Browse the March1895 and April/May 1895 issues of Anti-Caste.
- Browse: full issue of Household Words from 1858; Wellesley Index of Victorian Periodicals
- Due: Research Exercise 4: Bibliographic data and borrowing records [cloud version]
- Practicum: Working with bibliographic data
Week 5 Canon, Syllabus
Mon 2/21
- Read: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
- Read Daniel Hack, “The Citational Soul of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois,” in Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2016) [Canvas PDF]
- Practicum: Encoding Du Bois’s epigraphs [cloud version]
Wed 2/23
- Read: Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan, Introduction: A New Syllabus The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (2020) [Canvas PDF]
- Due: Research Exercise 5
- Practicum: Open Syllabus Project: charting the The Souls of Black Folk on syllabi
Week 6: Canons, Anthology
Mon 2/28
- Read: John Guillory, “Canonical and Noncanonical,” inCultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993) Canvas PDF Notes
- Read: Henry Louis Gates, “The Master’s Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African -American Tradition,” in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) Canvas PDF
- Read: Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (1988) Canvas PDF
Wed 3/2
- Read: Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak, “The Goodreads ‘Classics’: A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 6, no. 2 (April 20, 2021)
- Read: Richard Jean So, “1. Production: On White Publishing,” from Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction] (2021) [Canvas PDF]
- Optional reading: So, “Introduction” [Canvas PDF]
- Optional reading: José Eduardo González et al., “Measuring Canonicity: Graduate Reading Lists in Departments of Hispanic Studies,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 6, no. 1 (March 19, 2021)
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Due: Research Exercise 6 [interactive cloud version] - Practicum: Norton Anthologies of English Literature (see packet of Norton tables of contents provided by instructor) tables of contents as data; quantifying the canon
SPRING RECESS
Mon 3/7 - No class
Wed 3/9 - No class
Week 7: Libraries, Archives, Collections
Mon 3/14
- Read: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
- Read: Priya Joshi, Chapter 1 “The Poetical Economy of Consumption” and Chapter 2, “The Circulation of Fiction in Indian Libraries, ca. 1835-1901”In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (2002) Joshi endnotes Canvas PDF
- Browse: Shakespeare and Company Project and project dataset
- Library finding aids for the Silvia Beach Papers
Wed 3/16
- FIELD TRIP: Firestone Library Special Collections
- Browse:
- The Morris Parrish Collection of Victorian Literature collection
- Overview of M. L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists
- Browse the individual author collections catalog entries. Catalog entries by author (in PDF file format) are available here: http://libweb2.princeton.edu/rbsc2/parrish/
- “M. L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, 1806-1958 (mostly 1830-1939)” [finding aid]
- Note that the finding aid focuses on the manuscript and non-book portion of the collection
- The Sylvia Beach Papers
- “The Sylvia Beach Papers, 1872-1999” [finding aid]
- See how the Beach papers are used as sources in the Shakespeare and Company Project
- The Morris Parrish Collection of Victorian Literature collection
- Due: Research Exercise 7
Week 8: Digital Archives and Imperialism
Mon 3/21
- Read: Katherine Bode, “Fictional Systems: Network Analysis and Syndication Networks,” in A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018)
- Read: Roopika Risam, “Colonial Violence and the Postcolonial Digital Archive,” in New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (2018) [Canvas PDF]
Wed 3/23
- Read: David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Infectious Texts: Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers” (2013)
- Stephanie Yee and Tony Chu, “A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning” (2015)
- Read: Victor Powell, “Conditional probability explained visually.”
- Explore: The Arbital Guide to the Bayes Rule
- Due: Research Exercise 8
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Practicum: Modeling text-reuse interactive cloud version
Week 9: Novels and Social Space
Mon 3/28
- Read: David K. Elson, Nicholas Dames, and Kathleen R. McKeown, “Extracting Social Networks from Literary Fiction,” in Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL ’10 (Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010), 138–47, [Canvas PDF]
- Read: Matthew Wilkens, “The Geographic Imagination of Civil War-Era American Fiction,” American Literary History 25, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 803–40, [Canvas PDF]
Wed 3/30
- Read: David Bamman, “LitBank: Born-Literary Natural Language Processing,” Computational Humanities (2020)
- Please read the documentation for David Bamman’s BookNLP
- Optional: Scott Weingart, “Argument Clinic” (2017)
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Due: Research Exercise 9 interactive cloud version - Practicum: supervised machine learning: Named Entity Recognition, geocoding
Week 10: Machine Reading the History of Literary Studies
Mon 4/4
- Read: Lisa Rhody, “Topic Modeling and Figurative Language” (2012) for an overview of topic modeling
- Read: Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, “What can topic models of PMLA teach us about the history of literary scholarship?” ARCADE. (2012) (Completely optional: Goldstone and Underwood also have a longer published article on this research here: “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us” (2014)
- Read: Lauren Klein ” Dimensions of Scale: Invisible Labor, Editorial Work, and the Future of Quantitative Literary Studies” (2020)
- Optional reading: Benjamin Schmidt, “When you have MALLET, everything looks like a nail” (2012)
- Explore
- Signs @40: Feminist Scholarship Through Four Decades
- Andrew Goldstone’s dfr-browser and Topics in PMLA browser
Wed 4/6
- Read: Miriam Posner, “Very basic strategies for interpreting results from the Topic Modeling Tool” (2012)
- Read: David Blei, “Probabilistic Topic Modeling” (2012)
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In-class Practicum: Topic modeling and unsupervised machine learning interactive version - (PS. Make sure you’ve completed the topic modeling set up instructions in advance)
- DUE: Final Project Proposal
Week 11: Visualizing Literary Data
Mon 4/11
- Read: Lauren Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings” (2014)
- Read: Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display” (2011)
Wed 4/13
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Practicum: Visualizing literary data interactive cloud version - Due: No research exercise due: work on your final project!
- In class
- Stephanie Posavec’s Writing Without Words visualization of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
- Ben Fr’s “The Preservation of Favoured Traces” visualization of 6 editions of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
- Lincoln Mullen’s essay “Isn’t it Obvious?”
Week 12: Data Futures
Mon 4/18
- Read: Nan. Z. Da, “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies” (2019)
- Browse through the short responses to Da’s piece in “Computational Literary Studies: A Critical Inquiry Online Forum” (April 1-3, 2019)
- Choose 2-3 responses to read.
- Read: Miriam Posner, “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities” (2016)
Wed 4/20
- [FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATIONS]
Final Project Due Dean’s Date (5/3)