Category: Research
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Stop Writing in Microsoft Word
I recently published my first book, and at its launch I spoke about how I’d written and revised it. That talk combined with some comments I wrote for my graduate students this term on how to think about writing programs and other platforms. I’m deliberately not calling my writing program a ‘word processor’ because those…
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Literary Criticism in the Age of EEBO
This is the companion post for a talk I’m giving at St Anne’s College, Oxford on 19 November 2019. To begin, here’s a post I wrote on Machine Learning for Literary Critics in April 2017, and other posts on my sonnets research and on detecting rhetorical figures in early modern drama. In lieu of an abstract for this…
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The Way We Read Now: Criticism in the Age of EEBO
On November 5th, 2019, I gave a talk in the Renaissance Graduate Seminar at the University of Cambridge. It was a honour to give a paper in the RGS series — because as a postgrad in the Cambridge M.Phil. in Medieval and Renaissance Literature program, back in 1998-99, I regularly attended this seminar. I recall the…
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The Augmented Criticism Lab’s Sonnet Database
This is the text of a short paper I delivered at the Digital Humanities 2019 conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands on 12 July 2019. The Augmented Criticism Lab’s Sonnet Database is in beta release. To keep to my 10 minutes, I’ll be as focused as possible. My aim is to raise a research question, and…
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Quantifying the Miltonic Sonnet
(This paper was presented at the University of British Columbia in a joint session of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies and the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities at Congress 2019. You can download the complete slideshow as a PDF, here.)
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Iter at 20: A Look Forward
This is the text of my paper delivered at a New Technologies in Renaissance Studies panel at the 2019 Renaissance Society of America meeting in Toronto. Introduction Despite my title, I am not a futurist. I am a born optimist who looks forward to many things, but more in the aspirational more than the predictive…
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John Donne and the Sonnet Problem
What makes a sonnet? For most early modern examples, the answer is clear: a 14-line rhyming poem, its form either Shakespearean (three quatrains and a couplet) or Petrarchan (an octave and a sestet). There are exceptions to those formal rules, but most sonnets meet them. Formal rules are the conventional answer. And that answer works…
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NLP for Literary Critics: An Introduction and Tutorial
Preface: Knowledge and Information Shall I compare thee, human, to a machine? Thou art more critical and more intemperate (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18). But seriously: how do human readers compare to machines? I ask because I want to define how literary critics can use machines to augment and extend our readings. Figuring that out depends on…
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TEI for Close-Readings
This is the paper that I delivered on 13 November 2017 at the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) annual meeting at the University of Victoria (British Columbia). Here’s the PDF of my slideshow, whose images intersect my script below.
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Varieties of Chiasmus in 68 Plays
This is an expanded version of the paper that I delivered at the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society meeting in Portland, Oregon on 21 October 2017. You can download the slideshow in PDF. Two earlier posts in this series address the problem, and the programming methods I used to address it.