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Saturday, February 18, 2006
Lying, Lies, and Matthew Kirschenbaum
I must confess I found Matthew Kirschenbaum’s contribution the highlight of the Moretti event. (He seems to have thought the lack of substantive comment and continued conversation a sign of its failure. I hope this post helps, in some little way, to convince him otherwise.) This evening I wrote a sustained parody of Dashiell Hammett
As in “lying to a person” and “lying face up/down on the ground.” Here are links to the searches. I can’t be sure they’ll work on your computer, but they work on mine, my wife’s, and our neighbor’s, so they may work on yours: “lie
To return to Matthew’s post, I think we’ve unwittingly hit a tipping point in literary studies. I can’t imagine not using the empirical data now available to me . . . not just in my actual work, but even in something so simple as parodying a literary style. When I wrote my post tonight I had every adjectival phrase Hammett and Chandler published with the words “mouth” and “lips” and “eyes” in it at my disposal. I chose the ones I thought most effective. I didn’t write so much as sift and select. (Granted, had I not read the novels I wouldn’t have had a principle of selection capable of rendering the parody meaningful to Hammett’s readers. But I maybe could’ve come close, no?)
My point is simply that when we incorporate a technology into our lives as much as I’ve already incorporated textual databases into mine, we’re no longer talking about possibility so much as eventuality. And if that’s the case, we ought to be celebrating more concertedly the methodologies which will define our disciplinary futures.
Comments
, , , , I think we’ve unwittingly hit a tipping point in literary studies. I can’t imagine not using the empirical data now available to me
Well, I’d like to think so, but then I thought we’d reached a tipping point somewhere between 1965 and 1975. And we had, I just bet on the wrong direction of the tip. It’s one thing to have the tools available, it’s another thing to know how to use them.
I think, for example, if we saddle this new technology to the search for new “readings” that we’re wasting it. We really don’t need to keep feeding the interpretive sausage grinder, much less use high tech tools to increase the through-put. We need to rethink what we’re doing, top to bottom.
* * * * * *
Meanwhile, Science has just published a pair of articles the relates to the “dumb luck” line of thinking from the Moretti-fest and relates to this topic because the experiment involved using the internet to set up carefully controlled “interpretive communities” of music lovers:
Science 10 February 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5762, pp. 786 - 787
DOI: 10.1126/science.1124707
Perspectives
Experimental Macro Sociology: Predicting the Next Best Seller
Peter Hedström
A popular book, movie, or song can generate millions of dollars. But the social process that creates a blockbuster makes it difficult to predict which ones will succeed.
The author is at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, New Road, Oxford OX1 1NF, UK. E-mail: peter.
* * * * *
Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market
Science 10 February 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5762, pp. 854 - 856
DOI: 10.1126/science.1121066
Matthew J. Salganik,1,2* Peter Sheridan Dodds,2* Duncan J. Watts1,2,3*
Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful than average, suggesting that “the best” alternatives are qualitatively different from “the rest”; yet experts routinely fail to predict which products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by creating an artificial “music market” in which 14,341 participants downloaded previously unknown songs either with or without knowledge of previous participants’ choices. Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible.
1 Department of Sociology, 413 Fayerweather Hall, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027, USA.
2 Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University, 420 West 118th Street, 8th Floor, New York, NY, 10027, USA.
3 Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM, 87501, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: (M.J.S.); (P.S.D.); (D.J.W.)
Although I couldn’t have offered a comment more substantive than “Your team’s work sounds worthwhile and I look forward to learning more about it,” I was also very impressed by Matthew Kirschenbaum’s post. Graphs, Maps, Trees disappointed me; nora seems both more cautious and more genuinely experimental. Unfortunately, the project’s virtues may work against it in the marketplace: the least defensible aspects of Moretti’s book seem to be attracting the most positive attention.
Thanks for putting in those Science pointers, Bill.
Remember Scott, dead men don’t tell lies.
And as to the kinds of searches you mention, I remember when I first started doing them, I felt like I was somehow cheating, by bellettristic standards. But they’ve been available for a long time in one form, that of the old-fashioned concordance. I based a seminar paper on Milton on his every use of the words sole, solace, and soul.