The Discipline

March 2, 2016 By: Kate Stanley

"The Discipline" explores untold histories of literary study in the twentieth century. What futures for our discipline do these new pasts make possible?

Notes on the State of Indigeneity; or Turning South Again

December 21, 2021 By: Melanie Benson Taylor

My subtitle deliberately echoes Houston Baker’s pivotal monograph, Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism, Re-reading Booker T, which—when it was first published in 2001—fundamentally altered the course of Southern studies. Beginning with a primal reorientation around the experiences of Black slavery and incarceration, the New Southern Studies went on to perform a sweeping reevaluation of its terms, tropes, subjects, and geographies. Arguably one of the more exciting developments (for me, at...

Simone Weil and the Text as Organ of Perception

October 7, 2021 By: Thomas Sorensen

Literature is a protean phenomenon. Nobody seems quite sure how to classify it. Is it an object, immutable and self-contained? Or is it an event that happens when a self makes contact with a line of letters on a page? Nowadays, critics regard the text primarily as a resource. “There’s a lot of useful knowledge here,” we say, and our job is to show how this knowledge can help us in real life. Recently, I have come upon a fourth option. What if the text were an organ of perception, an extension of the body that structures our muddled, all-too-narrow picture of reality?

The Pedagogical Potential of the Eco-Epic

May 13, 2021 By: Kate Stanley

What resources can literature from the past offer when confronting the urgent present-moment reality of climate crisis? What function should the humanities classroom serve when the future of human life seems increasingly precarious? Anne Raine’s post, “Modernism, Eco-anxiety, and the Climate Crisis,” helped catalyze these questions for me by challenging us “to find ways to make climate change our job.” I’ve been trying to figure out how to meet this challenge in a course I’m teaching on literature and climate justice.

No Children, Only Tasks: Reflections on Cruel Pedagogies

February 8, 2021 By: Benjamin Hagen

I had not heard of ProctorU software until October 1, 2020 when I noticed that several folks on Twitter, whom I follow for their thoughts on pedagogy, had retweeted and responded to the same upsetting TikTok video I had come across earlier that same day. The video shows a young woman, crying, explaining that she had just failed an online exam not because she had been unprepared but because her professor’s surveillance software flagged her as “talking” out loud while taking the exam.

Where the Letters Lead: the Appalachian Prison Book Project

December 29, 2020 By: Katy Ryan

In 1994, Renaldo Hudson was on death row in Illinois. As we became friends, I knew where I stood in relation to the place where the plan was to kill him. I was not interested in starting a book club there or teaching a class. I was not interested in writing an essay on the literature of resistance.

Modernism, Cybernetics, and Systems Theory: Disciplinary Relevance in a STEM-focused World

November 17, 2020 By: Heather A. Love

In 1926, Gertrude Stein delivered the lecture “ Composition as Explanation” to the Cambridge Literary Club at Oxford University (fig. 1). The talk couches a description of her own evolution as an experimental author within a broader discussion of history, culture, and art as a series of distinct “composition[s].”As Kristin Bergen helpfully explains, the “multivocal term” composition at once designates “the dominant mode of daily life for a given period and also the production of those who...

Modernism’s Queer Pedagogies

June 8, 2020 By: Todd G. Nordgren

How did people learn to be queer in an era before stable identities, lifestyles, or representations of sexual outsiders were readily available or, for that matter, before they even existed?

Varieties of Educational Experience

February 5, 2020 By: Kate Stanley

In my first stab at drafting an inaugural post as the new editor of this forum, I went the Raymond Carver route, writing “What We Talk About When We Talk About the Discipline” across the top of a blank page. When that imagined dialogue hung fire for several weeks, I ventured greater specificity, replacing “We” with “I.” Pronouncements still unforthcoming, I searched my hard drive for toeholds. What have I talked about when I’ve talked about the discipline? My Documents folders returned zero hits for the phrase “the discipline.” I tried again, deleting “the” from the search, which revealed that I have only ever used the word “discipline” as a verb or an adjective—most often to describe the reading and writing habits and practices of the subjects of my first book (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and Nella Larsen). This lacuna was perhaps predictable: in my early career as a graduate student and then an untenured assistant professor, I was more concerned (and more comfortable) with proffering granular descriptions of literary activity in my field than with scaling up grand claims about the literary institution my studies were constituting

On Global Modernism and Academic Precarity: A Reply to Claire Barber-Stetson

June 20, 2019 By: Alys Moody

In the Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster on “ Modernism’s Contemporary Affects,” Claire Barber-Stetson writes probingly of the relationship between the precarious existence of graduate students and early career academics in English and the rise of global modernism. She sees the expansion of modernist studies, of which global modernism is perhaps the signal instance, as “driven—at least in part—by more pervasive precarity in literary studies as a profession,” and worries about the various challenges it poses to modernism as practiced in English departments. “It threatens,” she writes, “to dilute the term modernism beyond critical purchase, to leave graduate students without sufficient institutional support, and to divert resources from other fields, periods, and movements, including contemporary literary studies.”

Secret Societies!

December 20, 2018 By: Morgan Day Frank

“If it’s secret and elite, it can’t be good,” intones Luke McNamara, played by Joshua Jackson, the guy from The Mighty Ducks and Dawson’s Creek, in the final moments of the now forgotten movie, The Skulls (2000). The line is presented as a hard-earned revelation. Though McNamara, a scholarship student at Yale, is at first seduced by the secret society Skull and Bones, taking a vertiginous journey into its hidden world of power and luxury, he eventually comes to the sobering realization, after surviving a series of near-fatal altercations with its leaders, that the society’s anti-democratic tendencies “can’t be good.” The fact that such a banal revelation is presented as a revelation at all suggests the exhaustion of this bit of common sense. We’ve become tired—as worn out as McNamara is in the scene—of the lesson that secret society stories teach, the lesson that exclusive student organizations are nefarious while the universities that house them are meritocratic and transparent.

The World of Close Reading

October 3, 2018 By: Angus Connell Brown

When a convener adds Things Fall Apart (1959) to their syllabus something strange happens. If all goes well the class will read Chinua Achebe’s novel together, discussions will grow around the colonial history of Nigeria, and textual details will emerge from their conversation. Two systems will touch: context and close reading will intersect. The imperial damages and fugitive traditions of world history will come into contact with the New Critical leftovers of contemporary criticism. What’s...

Samuel R. Delany’s Atlantis: Model 1924 and the Origins of Blackness

July 4, 2018 By: Lavelle Porter

The epigraph implies origin. As a literary device it often announces source material for a text, and it is a place where, presumably, the reading experience begins. The epigraphs I have placed above are modeled after the form that Samuel R. Delany uses for his 1995 novella “Atlantis: Model 1924,” which has two literary excerpts at the beginning of each chapter. [1] Four of the five chapters of “Atlantis: Model 1924” contain epigraphs from Robert Hayden’s poem about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, “ Middle Passage.”

Search and Replace: Josephine Miles and the Origins of Distant Reading

April 11, 2018 By: Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan

From this day forward, every time you see the name Roberto Busa invoked as a—or the—founding scholar of either quantitative or computational method in the humanities, we want you to mentally search and replace with another name: Josephine Miles.

Pragmatism and Pedagogy: The Disciplinary Legacy of Hum 6

January 4, 2018 By: Kate Stanley

What can the acknowledgements page of an academic book reveal to us about the discipline of literary studies? Scholarly acknowledgment is often characterized by the special fulsomeness of its intimate enumeration of gratitude. It’s easy to experience a kind of vertigo when moving from the cozy intimacy of these expressions of thanks to the rigorous delimitations and impersonal critical surveys of the introductory material that follows. What would it mean to close the gap between these modes—to uncordon acknowledgment from prefatory convention so that it infuses more overtly within a monograph’s critical investigations? How might the work of denoting scholarly debts extend beyond a demarcated page to shape the sensibility of a book as a whole?

Aural Pleasure: Podcasting, Pedagogy and the Public Humanities

August 30, 2017 By: Séan Richardson

In the Spring of 2016, I received confirmation that I had been awarded funding to undertake doctoral study that coming October. Overwhelmed, I physically jumped for joy, promptly thumping my skull on the shelf that rested shortly above me. Usually, we bang our heads due to frustration brought about by inertia, but I think about this literal knock as a transitional moment, one which allowed me to cross the battle lines drawn by my desk, seceding from the administrative camp and joining the ranks of graduate school

My Brilliant, Scolding Friend: Willa Cather and Zoë Akins’s Epistolary Feedback

June 8, 2017 By: Sara Bryant

An early letter from Willa Cather to Zoë Akins in 1914 consists almost entirely of blunt feedback to the aspiring writer. Some representative lines, "This story, my dear Zoe is written to be smart. . . . There’s either got to be real feeling in a story, or an intellectual interest of the highest order. . . .

“The Inconvenient Critics”: Institutional History and Political Economy

March 15, 2017 By: Christopher Findeisen

In Mary McCarthy’s 1952 academic novel The Groves of Academe, the protagonist Henry Mulcahy is let go from Jocelyn College, a self-described sanctuary of academic freedom in a world haunted by the specter of Joseph McCarthy. The facts of the matter are undisputed: Mulcahy writes an article for Marxist Quarterly about dialectical materialism in James Joyce, donates money to the Henry Wallace campaign, attends a meeting given in support of dissenting political opinions, and then is informed by his employer that his contract with the college will not be renewed.

Football University

December 1, 2016 By: Mark Cooper

As we completed our book on the US research university amidst the political tumult of the last several months, we resisted the urge to add laments, policy recommendations, or vision statements to the growing pile. Instead, we sought to reframe familiar arguments about the university by calling attention to its media, which are so often looked past (or through) by critics of higher education.

Topic Modeling Modernism/modernity

May 26, 2016 By: Jonathan Goodwin

Laura Heffernan’s introductory post describes work being done in what she calls the “new disciplinary history.” I have an interest in using quantitative methods to practice disciplinary history. In this post, I explore some of these methods using the archives of Modernism/modernity. The quantitative analysis of a journal has a long history. Sociologists of science, for example, have long used citation patterns to reveal the disciplinary structure of a field.

New Disciplinary History

March 2, 2016 By: Laura Heffernan

In the Spring of 2001, while a graduate student in Philadelphia, I inherited the instructorship for a Temple University continuing education course called, accurately if awkwardly, “Books You Wish You’d Read.” Everything about this gig screamed “easy money,” starting with the course title’s modest past perfect promise — no one, it seems, was expecting me to transform adult students into readers of the classics; all I had to do was turn a few classics into books they had read.

Print Plus Exclusive

Topic Modeling Modernism/modernity

May 26, 2016 By: Jonathan Goodwin

Volume 1 Cycle 2

Tags:

digital humanities topic modeling

Editor's note: Blog revised on June 21, 2016 to incorporate missing articles from original M/m corpus.

The quantitative analysis of a journal has a long history. Sociologists of science, for example, have long used citation patterns to reveal the disciplinary structure of a field. More recently, digitized journals and contemporary computational tools help lower the barrier to entry to the often-laborious task of conducting analysis on a journal’s content. In what follows, I’ll give some notes on how I used the back catalogue of Modernism/modernity to convert the journal into a topic model, a context-sensitive word-vector analysis, and several forms of citation analysis.

Topic Modeling

Topic modeling is a technique used by information-retrieval researchers to classify documents. It infers the thematic structure of a collection by analyzing co-occurrence patterns. There are several varieties of topic modeling. The one I used to explore Modernism/modernity is known as LDA, and a good non-technical introduction to it can be found in this article by David Blei, one of its originators. There have been several examples of humanities disciplinary analysis using topic modeling. Andrew Goldstone’s and Ted Underwood’s “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies” looks at literary studies and John Laudun’s and my “Computing Folklore Studies” examines folklore.

Creating a topic model of a journal involves converting the full text of each article to a bag-of-words representation. The algorithm is not context-sensitive. The full text of Modernism/modernity was graciously made available to me by Johns Hopkins University Press. The platform, Project Muse, on which it is hosted does not have an API to process requests like JSTOR. I used Andrew Goldstone’s dfrtopics to create the topic model in R. Goldstone’s package provides an interface to MALLET, a commonly used implementation of LDA, along with many useful functions for pre-processing and analysis.

The HTML text of the journals needs to be converted to plain text, and a metadata file that indexes each article also needs to be created. The technical details of how I did this are beyond the scope of this post, but I will be glad to share them with anyone interested. After the pre-processing has been completed, the next major decisions involve choosing the number of topics that the will be found in the collection. There are ways to automate this selection, but I find that trial-and-error is usually sufficient. For this model, I decided on fifty topics. I also used a large stop-word list provided by the package, and I added a few words to it. (Again, I will share the stop-word list and other settings used to create the model with anyone interested. I cannot redistribute the source files, however.)

After the model was created, I used Andrew Goldstone’s dfr-browser to create this visualization. The browser has a number of different views used to reveal different aspects of the model. If you choose the “List” view and sort by proportion of corpus, you’ll notice several topics that have high representation with little in the way of topic specificity. Topic 28, for instance, is the most prominent in the corpus. It is made up entirely of what I call “argument words”—words which are often used to establish claims in academic discourse. These prove difficult to eliminate via stop-words, as there are always more of them than you might suspect. Similarly, Topic 18 shows words that are particular to book reviews.

When creating topic models of journals, book reviews and editorial comments are often eliminated. I chose not to do so with this model, as I wanted to show how the model would classify the entirety of the journal. I even included the “Recent Books of Interest” feature, which is largely clustered in Topic 37 and Topic 42. (Advertising, however, is not included.) Topic 16 shows a cluster of articles devoted to textual editing and genetic criticism. I also chose not to eliminate “modernism” from the model, even though it’s in the title of the journal and thus is going to be even more prevalent than it would be otherwise.

The topics themselves range from ones devoted to well-known authors (Stein, Eliot, Woolf, and Beckett) to those that reflect the interdisciplinary character of the journal: art history, film, architecture, and music. As the journal has maintained a consistent focus for its relatively short period of publication, there was little of notice in the chronological trends displayed in the browser. The film and Wilde/decadence show a general increase, though the special issue in 2008 accounts for much of the latter’s rise. In general, the LDA algorithm does not do a good job of tracking changes over time. There are variants such as the dynamic topic model that are designed to track semantic change over time, but I have not implemented one here.

Word2vec, or Theology - God = Theory

Next, I want to explore the Modernism/modernity corpus through word2vec, a machine learning technique that has recently received a great deal of attention (to see an interactive tree visualization of this model, visit the author's website). Humanists who have used it or related word-vector methods include Michael Gavin, Ryan Heuser, and Ben Schmidt. I have used Schmidt’s wordVectors for this analysis. As these posts explain, vector-based approaches seem to have more potential for discourse analysis than topic models. They are capable of startling feats of analogy on large corpora. One journal, however, is not large enough in general to show many of these effects. The standard example of “king” - “man” + “woman” = “queen” does not quite work on this corpus, returning only a vector consisting of “king” and “woman.” (“Theology” - “God” did equal “theory,” however.) Perhaps a journal in renaissance studies would be more likely to complete this analogy.

Visualizing the entirety of a word2vec model is difficult, and I will not attempt it here. As with the co-citation network, better results would be achieved with combining the journal with those of others in the field. It is easier to visualize certain vectors. If you choose the top words in Topic 12, and reduce them to a two-dimensional space, this is the resulting visualization:

[[{"fid":"1309","view_mode":"wysiwyg","type":"media","link_text":null,"attributes":{"alt":"A Two Dimensional Reduction of the Vector Space Model Using t-SNE","height":"1536","width":"1538","class":"file-wysiwyg media-element"}}]]

The terms nearest “sex” in the vector model are “sexuality,” “sexual,” “female,” and “illicit.” Compare this list to Topic 30, in which “illicit” does not appear. The word “genre” appears in Topic 12 and Topic 25 of the topic model, but it is not strongly associated with either. In the vectorized model, “detective” is most strongly associated with “genre,” along with “conventions” and “reappraisal.”

Neither “illicit” nor “detective” appear in the topic model because neither word appears frequently enough in the corpus. The context-sensitive word2vec model, however, assigns them a greater significance because of how often they appear within a certain window of words like “genre” and “sex.” Humanists are often critical of the bag-of-words representation that topic modeling approaches use, and it’s an understandable reaction. The word2vec model, while contextualized, uses an almost completely opaque internal representation. (Distrust of the “black box” model runs high among humanists, for good reason.) I feel that these classifying systems are best used for exploratory purposes. They can create unexpected juxtapositions or help you find things that you might have otherwise overlooked, but I’m more skeptical of interpretations based on them.

Citation Analysis, Three Ways

There are a variety of measures of what is cited in a journal. The most-cited articles published in the journal measure what other readers have found important or central to their work. The idea of what it means to cite something varies across many disciplinary contexts, of course. Here’s how Bruno Latour visualized the rhetoric of citations:

[[{"fid":"1311","view_mode":"wysiwyg","type":"media","link_text":null,"attributes":{"alt":"Bruno Latour, Rhetoric of Citations","height":"980","width":"1552","class":"file-wysiwyg media-element"}}]]Humanists cite fewer materials than scientists. Journal articles are less important for humanists’ work, generally speaking, than monographs. Furthermore, many well-cited journal articles often end up published in book form, diluting the citation pool.

Here are the most-cited articles published in Modernism/modernity according to Google Scholar:

Article	Citations
Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.” 1999.	297
Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism.” 2001.	167
Susan Stanford Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies.”	110
George W. Stocking, “The Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race.” 1994.	98
Bill Brown, “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism).” 1999.	83

The five most-cited articles have a number of things in common. Miriam Hansen’s article is interdisciplinary, drawing on both film and modernist studies. Articles that cross disciplines are often the most-cited. (Pierre Nora’s “Between Memory and History” is one of the most-cited articles in any humanities discipline, for example.) And Susan Stanford Friedman’s two articles engage with definition and periodization: two recurring topics in modernist studies.

And these are the most frequently cited texts in articles published in Modernism/modernity:

Source	Citations
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide. 1986.	19
James Joyce, Ulysses. 1986.	17
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. 1999.	14
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. 1968.	13
Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. 1984.	13
Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. 2009.	13
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory. 1975.	12
Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism. 1998.	11
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament. 1995.	10
Michael North, Dialect of Modernism. 1994.	10
Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank. 1986.	9
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. 1988.	9
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. 1996.	9
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. 1922.	8
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity. 1995.	8

This citation data comes from the Web of Science service. The parsers used by Web of Science do not always track information in Chicago-style footnotes accurately in my experience, but the overall results seen here would likely not differ much if counted by hand. Huyssen’s book was one of the subjects of an MSA panel “The Making of Modernist Studies” (W8) on returning to classics of the discipline in 2015.

In addition to counting the cited material within a journal and tracking its external citations, the network of citations can be visualized. The most useful way of doing this is through a co-citation network, in which sources that are cited together are the nodes rather than the citing article. See the following diagram taken from Scott Weingart’s useful explanatory post:

[[{"fid":"1310","view_mode":"wysiwyg","type":"media","link_text":null,"attributes":{"alt":"Co-Citations","height":"1632","width":"1800","class":"file-wysiwyg media-element"}}]]A co-citation network of only Modernism/modernity has not proven very fruitful, due to a combination of small sample size and noise in the Web of Science parser caused by misidentifying Chicago-style repeat citations as “Anonymous.” I could fix this by hand, but I prefer not to. In the meantime, here is a co-citation network of several journals in modernist studies, plus two dynamic network graphs that show changes in the network over time.

Conclusion

The inaugural post in this series mentioned the “anxious self-reflection native to the mode” of disciplinary history. At times, working with the tools I describe above can indeed be anxiety-inducing, or even rage-inducing, I’m sad to say. For example, the mechanism of “preferential attachment” or the “Matthew effect” evident in citation analysis can be rather depressing. (Likewise, my initial effort at quantifying Modernism/modernity also led to results that some found depressing.) It does not require much cynicism to believe that scholars read less than they claim and cite more to show allegiance and affiliation rather than intellectual engagement. Modernism/modernity is perhaps less prone to these issues than many journals I have studied, however. Its interdisciplinary and contextualist emphasis encourages a wide range of sources, and that partially explains why relatively few texts do not dominate its range of reference.

A final thought: another easily countable thing in the journal would be the presses of the books that are reviewed in it. An early version of the topic model that included numbers showed me how standardized academic book prices were. Checking the prices listed in the book reviews of journals that are older than Modernism/modernity might be a relatively easy way to chart the rise in price of scholarly books over time. Even measures as simple as the length of the articles or number of references in them graphed over time may reveal tacit changes in editorial policy or methodology. I may work on these issues in the future, and I would be glad to hear from any readers of this post about matters specific to these models and visualizations or larger questions about quantifying disciplinary history.