Data Mining the Literary Hyperarchive and Some Other Links

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Ted Underwood, a professor of 18th and 19th century literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has an interesting post on text mining and what is being called “distant reading,” “We Don’t Already Know the Broad Outlines of Literary History.” His blog is The Stone and the Shell: Historical Questions Raised by a Quantitative Approach to Language.

Some notes on the storm hitting the Northeast.

And io9‘s George Dvorsky reports on Lee Smolin’s theory of Cosmological Natural Selection, the idea that: “gives a kind of raison d’etre to our universe and all the objects flying through it. If true, it would mean that our universe is nothing more than a black hole generator, or a means to produce as many baby universes as possible.”

Forthcoming: The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World

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I just sent along my corrected proofs for a chapter, titled “Apocalypse Networks: Representing the Nuclear Archive,” which will appear in The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World, to be published this spring by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and edited by Michael J. Blouin, Morgan Shipley, and Jack Taylor. You can check out a description of the book here. And the book is available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many other booksellers. I am quite excited for this collection, which will include contributions from a number of notable scholars and nuclear critics, including Paul K. Saint-Amour, Daniel Cordle, and John Canaday.

Hyperarchival Nothingness

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When we go through the painstaking process of adding nothing to the archive, we might as well send stuff to the Journal of Universal Rejection. About the journal:

The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected. Despite that apparent drawback, here are a number of reasons you may choose to submit to the JofUR:

–You can send your manuscript here without suffering waves of anxiety regarding the eventual fate of your submission. You know with 100% certainty that it will not be accepted for publication.

–There are no page-fees.

–You may claim to have submitted to the most prestigious journal (judged by acceptance rate).

–The JofUR is one-of-a-kind. merely submitting work to it may be considered a badge of honor.

–You retain complete rights to your work, and are free to resubmit to other journals even before our review process is complete.

–Decisions are often (though not always) rendered within hours of submission.

At least they’re honest. They also have a (pretty great) blog. (Thanks to Tobias for this one.)

The Flood This Time: Some 2012 Weather Links

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2012, by all accounts, was the warmest year on record. Among many other responses to the disastrous 2012 (w/r/t weather) both The New Inquiry and Jacobin: A Magazine of Culture and Polemic have published some excellent pieces on climate change, disaster, and our contemporary sense of an ending. Among them are Alyssa Battistoni’s excellent, “The Flood Next Time: Life After Emergency” at Jacobin. The New Inquiry has devoted an entire issue to weather , including a nice editorial, and an essay from the incomparable Gerry Canavan, “Après Nous, le Déluge.”  (This is all also coming in the wake of this nonsense.) These magazines, along w/ my good friend Alexander Provan’s Triple Canopy, also just had a very nice writeup in The Guardian. Enjoy.

The Year of DFW, According to Some

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Now that it’s been pointed out by Michael Moats at Fiction Advocate, I’m realizing the gaggle of David Foster Wallace-related stuff that happened in 2012. The great deal of material that has appeared this year that is in some way connected to DFW has inspired Moats to title his (incomplete . . .) encyclopedic recounting of all this stuff, the “Year of David Foster Wallace” (part 2 is here).

Matt Bucher, administrator of the wallace-l listserv, also weighed in with, “Consider the Year of David Foster Wallace.”

To be honest, however, I don’t necessarily see this trend slowing down too considerably in 2013, as, for example, DFW’s name was mentioned a number of times in Joel Lovell’s recent review-essay in The New York Times, “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year” (a book, titled The Tenth of December, that I very much look forward to reading). Bucher also points out that that we will probably be receiving at least 4 more books that revolve in the DFW orbit in 2013.

Though posted in November, I want to draw attention to Chris Osmond also briefly reflecting on DFW’s pedagogy in his blog post, “Hideous Teachers.” Beginning another semester of SC today where my students will be reading DFW (yet again) makes me realize how valuable his writing can be in the classroom.