A belated link to Poetry, Patterns, and Provocation, my contribution on the nora project to The Valve’s recent book event for Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees.
The discussion of nora was fine and I was grateful for the opportunity, though I found the rest of the conversation mixed: highlights were the contributions from Moretti himself, Steve Johnson, and Bob O’Hara, an evolutionary biologist with a penchant for narrative theory. Other responses were suffused with such a thick haze of snark that it was hard to justify the time needed to suss out a reasonable reply. I can’t help the feeling that The Valve enjoyed kicking Moretti and data mining around for a week or ten days and will now move on to fresh topics with equal verve and vigor, the discussion itself (and the venting of the snark) having been the main thing. I’d feel differently if I saw someone motivated to take up an actual project. Success of failure, that’s how we change the way we read and work.
Posted by mgk at January 21, 2006 12:03 PM
As the organizer of the event, I have to say that I have a high degree of interest in projects like the one you described and Moretti's in general, though they're necessarily on the far horizon of my research agenda for the time being. I'm also puzzled by what seems to me to be an overestimation of the responses' "snarkiness." If you mean by that a facile and perhaps slightly sneering dismissal of very serious work--the manner of book reviewing The Believer was founded against--I don't see very much in the responses themselves. Occasionally the comments have turned that way, but that's difficult to avoid to a certain extent.
There's still some more to come, and I will vet for snark.
Posted by: Jonathan at January 21, 2006 09:51 PM | Link to CommentMatt,
In your piece at the Valve, I was struck by the series of questions. If I may be so bold to suggest that they be grouped into two categories, those categories would be "comparisons" and "representations of comparisons". Your listing begins with questions of comparisons (e.g. word frequency in a given natural language versus distributions in a given literary work or corpus). You then move to questions of representation, for example, visualization of information. I point this out because I think the difficulty for some of the people gingerly approaching intellectual exercises of this type lies not so much with understanding the dynamics of comparison. The more difficult and challenging step is to arrive at an understanding that all representation is indeed some sort of translation. For the researcher in literary studies it means, I believe, not only mastering the data mining techniques to be able to cover more ground in less time but also arriving at a genuine recognition that one relies on the work of scholars who have read and prepared texts (visual, auditory and verbal) for the processing. Furthermore, the best possible information interchange requires a significant investment in transparency grounded in intensive communication with colleagues. Projects like NORA scare people because their iterative nature -- no nice and tidy endpoint -- and because they call for rigour, both technical and intellectual. A commitment to continuous rigour demands a high degree of humility. And humility doesn't spring from weak egos.
My take on the psychological impressionism may be way off base and I may be overreaching in suggesting that tackling representations as a special case comparators may be a way of wooing interested parties to partake in the glow of the awe and make mining their own...
Posted by: Francois Lachance at January 23, 2006 04:05 PM | Link to CommentMatt -- I wouldn't be discouraged about things over at the valve. I was happy to find out about nora, which I hadn't known about before. And I'd love to do a project, but, as an unfunded and independent scholar, that's rather outside my means. Who knows, maybe Moretti will undertake a data mining project.
Posted by: Bill Benzon at January 25, 2006 05:49 PM | Link to CommentHi Bill,
It's funny, I just stopped by the Valve earlier today and bookmarked your post and several others for reading. I think the discussion turned out to be very worthwhile after all. As I wrote to Jonathan backchannel after his comment above, I was simply disappointed in some of the early replies, which seemed to be serving pre-existing agendas rather than engaging the book and the work--but that effect has been mitigated by the more recent contributions.