My first publication based on my history of computation project is finally out today. Binder, Jeffrey M. “Romantic Disciplinarity and the Rise of the Algorithm.” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 4 (Summer 2020): 813-834. Abstract: Scholars in both digital humanities and media studies have noted an apparent disconnect between computation and the interpretive methods of the humanities. Alan … Read more
My latest article is out online today. Binder, Jeffrey M. “The Eighteenth-Century Elocution Movement and Facebook: Reading Emotion Before and After the Subject.” Media Culture and Society. Published online Aug. 18, 2019. Abstract: The rise of social media has recently inspired a renewed debate about the decentering of the subject. Some scholars have responded to … Read more
Now available online, accessible to all: Alien Reading: Text Mining, Language Standardization, and the Humanities. Preview: For all the talk about how computers allow for new levels of scale in humanities research, new debates over institutional structures, and new claims to scientific rigor, it is easy to lose sight of the radical difference between the way … Read more
Collin Jennings and I have a new article in ELH: “A Scientifical View of the Whole”: Adam Smith, Indexing, and Technologies of Abstraction. Abstract: While numerous literary scholars have raised concerns about the capacity of computational methods to reveal unrecognized features of literary form and content, few have explored the approach of interpreting these methods in relation … Read more
Collin Jennings and I have an article in Literary and Linguistic Computing: Visibility and meaning in topic models and 18th-century subject indexes. Abstract: This article addresses the ‘meaning problem’ of unsupervised topic modeling algorithms using a tool called the Networked Corpus, which offers a way to visualize topic models alongside the texts themselves. We argue that … Read more