In his book Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (1985) – Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990) – Friedrich A. Kittler brought discourse analysis to media studies, coining discourse network to “also designate the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data” (qtd. Liu 50n4). Reformulated as such, discourse gains direction, speed, Read More
Maybe we should chat about this: “Empirical assessment of emotions in literary texts has sometimes relied on human annotation” but now an algorithmic “system determines which of the words exist in our emotion lexicon and calculates ratios such as the number of words associated with an emotion to the total number of emotion words in the text” for novels, Shakespeare, Read More
When it comes to listening to vinyl, NYC artist Rutherford Chang antithesizes what Franco Moretti identifies as the “typical reader of novels” in Britain up to about 1820 (Moretti 71). Instead of “a ‘generalist…who reads absolutely anything, at random’” (Moretti 71, quoting Albert Thibaudet), Chang listens to and collects anything, mostly at random, of a Read More
Probe, or Rogue Suicide-Bomber Probe Droid? (Is that a fact?) In view of our reading of Latour’s rearticulation of the assumptions informing the concepts of “facts” and “values” into new terms that recognize the processual cyclicity of institutionalizing always-debatable uncertainties into useful certainties, and in view of Alice Munro’s having just been awarded the Nobel Read More