Singing in English class

I've posted before on a general reluctance to sing, which is to say I'm aware of it. My theory is that people think there's a group of people who are "singers," who are allowed to sing because their voices have been approved (by somebody) as not dangerous to the natural order of the universe. Everyone else is "audience."

I have a parallel theory, that everyone actually wants to sing and hopes that someone, somewhere, will let them into the group of approved singers, because singing is really damn fun. This is the desire that drives karaoke, American Idol, and the like. The trials of shame are worth it if perhaps one day you'll be allowed to sing without shame. Sometimes you'll see friends casually sitting around singing, or somebody singing in her car with the window rolled down. It's as though they're getting away with something.

For my Didactic Modernism class on Tuesday morning, I made my students sing. I wasn't sure I was really going to do it, up until that very morning.

Nearly first thing, I asked them to sing a major scale, which they did, being good sports. Then I had them sing the scale in parallel thirds, which they again did. Finally, I taught them to sing the first four measures of this song (the whole song only being eight measures anyway), in four-part harmony. The bass situation was a little pathetic, especially since I categorically cannot sing bass, and we sounded terrible, but I gave them to understand that sounding like angels wasn't really the point. Wonderful students that they are, they gave it a shot, and we muddled through pretty well.

The point was this. By making my students sing scales, and then learn from scratch a piece of music they'd never sung before, I put them in the position of beginners, including those who happened to have a lot of musical training. Perhaps they were feeling mildly insulted and not a little frustrated. Perhaps they felt that, as advanced English majors, they knew what they were supposed to be doing in an English class, and this was not it.

Modernist poetry, I argued, will do this to you. You think you know how to read, but it makes you start over; it puts you in the position of someone who has to go back to fundamentals and learn from the ground up. It addresses you as "ephebe." It tries to teach you the A B C of Reading. Hence "didactic modernism." As Julie Andrews would say: "When you read, you begin with A, B, C; when you sing you begin with do, re, mi."

Modernist poetry, I argued, is most difficult precisely when it seems simplest. So we spent some time looking at a snippet from Tender Buttons, and then a bit more time reading that often-read Williams poem, "This Is Just to Say."

I had one more ulterior motive with the singing, which was to set a tone for the class. They've all sung in front of one another; nothing they wish to say about Pound's Cantos could possibly be more risky. (This was of course a brilliant segue into my draconian course policies.)

I can't tell yet whether it was just a funny first-day gimmick or something that will produce a difference in the way the course operates--actually, there's no way I can ever tell. But if my students were traumatized they've hidden it well, and they were terrific discussing I. A. Richards on Thursday, so I'm calling it a success.

Tonight: Robert Duncan: The H. D. Book

The Holloway Series in Poetry Celebrates

Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book (newly out from University of California Press)


7:00PM-8:30PM
Thursday, January 20
315 Wheeler Hall (the Maude Fife Room)
*Reception to follow*


This legendary meditation on poetics, a central text of the San Francisco Renaissance
and of the New American Poetics has been buried in fugitive literary magazines and
literary archives for several decades and is now appearing for the first time in its
entirety in book form from the University of California Press.


Featured Readers

Michael Davidson
Michael Palmer
Brenda Hillman
Cecil Giscombe
Aaron Shurin
Giovanni Singleton
Susan Thackery
Jane Gregory
Gillian Osborne

Me: Did you know that I can see the sunset over the San Francisco Bay from my office window?

Dan: I can see Oakland....

I made my students sing.

That was the aforementioned unorthodox exercise. More anon.

Q. What should I do if I'm on the wait list?

A. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but the answer is: Wait. On the list.

Spring semester

Yesterday a colleague and I wandered out for a post-MLA, pre-spring semester tea. In the process, it came to our attention that it actually is kind of springlike. I've been going around in a cardigan. It's sunny and beautiful here, while all of our friends are digging themselves out of snowdrifts. We're at that stage of life when we don't quite know where we'll be next year. But right now? Bay Area, people. It's pretty nice.

"Winter" in Berkeley. (The Japanese quince outside my apartment, photo taken five minutes ago.)

With the new semester about to begin, it feels like a good time to take stock of current projects.

Teaching.

I'm very excited to be teaching an advanced American modernist poetry seminar this semester. Cal students are great, and we'll be reading some of my favorite poetry. Any time I teach texts I really adore, I feel like I'm beating the system. Which I guess I kind of am. I have a somewhat unorthodox exercise planned for the first day of class; I'll report back if I actually do it.

I'm also serving as faculty sponsor for the De-Cal "Video Games as an Artistic Medium," which should be fun.

Conferences.

• I'll be giving a paper on feminist periodization at ACLA in Vancouver. I was kind of suckered into this, but I've brought myself around to the idea that overcommitment is a good thing, and I'm looking forward to going. I've heard good things about the ACLA seminar format, and now's as good a time as any to see it in action.
• Scott Selisker and I are putting together a panel for MLA 12. I'm excited about every aspect of this except the part where I draft the proposal, which I'm supposed to be doing this weekend instead of blogging. Prepare to be blown away. Will there be Roombas? Maybe.
• I really am going to propose that Against Innovation panel for MSA 13. I've had a surprising amount of interest already, considering I haven't actually put out a CFP, but you know. Interested/amused/bewildered parties are still more than welcome to contact me.

Research projects.

• An article on Berssenbrugge, on which I've posted a few times, is close to being sent out.
• Remember when I said I didn't have time to write anything on the relationship between children and animals? I'm going to.
• An article on Stein, in progress.
• Possibly, text-mining, the responsible version (not the epistemic candy version.)
• My book. I can't really summarize what's happening with the book, but let's provisionally say that the Williams chapter is leading inevitably to Olson and thence to contemporary notions of "experiment."

Arcade.

New multimedia will go live as soon as our tech editor has time to flip the proverbial switch. Colloquies and a Drupal upgrade will follow.

* * *

It probably says something about academia that I find the beginning-of-semester onslaught as familiar and comforting as a fuzzy blanket, but I'm just going to roll with it. Happy spring semester, everyone!

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!

The weird thing about the recent Huckleberry Finn "controversy"

The words "Huckleberry Finn" have been trending on Twitter all day. Evidently some dubious press of which neither you nor I has ever heard is putting out an edition in which the word "nigger" is replaced by the word "slave."

This is not really newsworthy. It wouldn't be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn if someone weren't trying to censor it--I believe Myra Jehlen wrote an essay on this very subject. That the press doing the censoring is so very, very marginal speaks to how utterly canonical the novel--and its quasi-iconoclasm--has become.

What's interesting to me is the way the news is being received on Twitter. Most of what I've seen is plain outrage. How could they etc. My impression is that most people don't realize the following:

1. There are multiple editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, put out by different presses and different editors, among which readers are free to choose, and also the first edition is in the public domain and widely available for free.

2. The press that is putting out this edition is negligible, not least because the only thing of note that it has ever done is put out a bad edition of Huckleberry Finn.

3. Huckleberry Finn is not a franchise like Dora the Explorer. There is no single corporation that can or will control its image or content. You can't "update" Huckleberry Finn the way you can "update" Nancy Drew or Strawberry Shortcake or the aforementioned Dora.

It's the last point that's the most striking to me. It gives us tweets like these:

[Source.]

"They're really changing Huckleberry Finn? America lost their common sense"

[Source.]

"Huckleberry Finn is eliminating the "N" word from new editions to be less offensive. Also, Moby Dick will now be called Moby Penis."

[Source.]

"New editions of Huckleberry Finn will be censored to remove the "n" word? #fuckyourpoliticalcorrectness #apparentlyfuckclassicliterature"

Huckleberry Finn becomes a unified brand, like Coca-Cola. It's as though we cannot imagine an art work that is not first and foremost corporate intellectual property. It suggests that those of us whose job it is to know about publishing, intellectual property, textual editing, and so-called classics (a word that I've seen thrown around a lot regarding this most recent of HF controversies) haven't done enough to get the word out to those whose job it isn't, but who would benefit from knowing. It would be worth tipping people off that, yes, bad editions exist, and so do good ones. Sometimes it takes a little investigation to tell the difference.

The truth is that the academic humanities has often relied on the publishing industry to do its public outreach. Sometimes that works out, but not in this case. It's not in trade publishers' interests to get people to care about textual editing, because critical editions are almost by definition not what they sell. (How much does Viking care about the Schulman edition of Marianne Moore's poems? Not very much, because it's still in print.)

Cheap reprints of public domain works--like the Higginson editions of Dickinson's poems, of which I remember receiving a pretty hardcover edition from an aunt one Christmas--have long been a boon for publishers wanting to exploit the cultural capital of "classics." The most recent version of this is the fact that you can read Project Gutenberg editions for free on the Kindle. Which is true enough, but there are some situations in which the Gutenberg edition is fine and others in which it's a dreadful idea. This has always been true; it's just more obvious when it comes to removing the word "nigger" from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And in fact it wouldn't be a controversy if it weren't news that texts are always mediated, that multiple editions of a work can coexist, and that a novel isn't always the same thing as a franchise.

I've heard it lamented that, since Wikipedia reached its effective saturation point, it's no longer possible to assign the salutary "write a Wikipedia article" project. Perhaps the next step is to get our students to go to existing Wikipedia articles for particular works and add summaries of the major textual issues.

Somewhere, Roland Barthes is having a big laugh. But then, I guess that's always true.

Why PMLA should become PLotMLA; or, Using your powers for good

I'm not really a PMLA-hater in the way that so many seem to be. I feel that I've read many a good article in it, and one of the great things about PMLA is that it's ubiquitous and covers a lot of scholarly terrain that I forget that I give a crap about when not reminded from time to time. PMLA is the irregularly-appearing, late-arriving, flimsily bound, comically hyperprofessionalized flagship publication of our field. From where I stand it would be a little hard not to love it.*

But I think PMLA should fold.

Think about it. The MLA is forever passing resolutions, which are well-intentioned, controversial only to a limited subset of nerds, and nonbinding. A statement from the MLA on the ethical treatment of adjuncts is a welcome thing, but it isn't likely hiring practices or people's life situations all that much. I actually think the most awesome thing the MLA has done in recent years is open a Twitter account for Rosemary Feal.** (The MLA: it's friendly!) Prestige only gets you so far. (Please correct me if I'm wrong; I'd love to hear that the MLA made some department start adding tenure lines.)

It's a different matter, though, when it comes to publishing. The MLA does actually put out its own publications, and they're some of the most useful and central to the profession, much as we love to affectionately deride PMLA and compare the MLA Handbook unfavorably to the magisterial CMoS. As slow to update as the MLA Bibliography is, as prone to crashing as the JIL is, where would we be without these things?

The greatest virtue of being the center of the profession is being the center of the profession. Suppose PMLA were to move entirely to open peer review and open access, reconstituting itself as a Public Library of the MLA (on the model of PLoS), perhaps with the help of an NEH grant. Would its prestige disappear? I doubt it. Its reputation for stodginess might, though.

Unlike those resolutions, the move to open peer review and open access would amount to an action, not just a recommendation. Because PMLA comes with a boatload of prestige, it would solve one problem that open peer review projects often face: fear among contributors that their work won't count toward promotion and tenure. It could be a decisive move to open up the acceptance of open peer review in the humanities, and make it easier for other journals to move to such models.

I am, of course, leaving aside the logistical complications, which are legion. And in a way, I understand the value of PMLA behaving like the most conservative journal of all time. It can't really afford to make sudden moves, precisely because it's big and central and purports to represent such a broad range of scholars.*** Any move PMLA makes is likely to be consequential, whether or not it's where we want the profession to be. But that's what drives so many people nuts about it now, and that's why the switch could effect a powerful change in how we handle scholarly publication.


*One of the most regularly made criticisms of PMLA (which Gregory Jusdanis, for example, makes) is that it is insufficiently "cutting-edge" or "revolutionary." I'm already on record as being against innovation, so it will come as no surprise that I think this desideratum is misguided. This topic is worth more than a footnote, but for now I'll just say that, first, newness is not self-evidently a good, and second, that to reserve approval for that scholarship which thoroughly changes our thinking is analogous to a capitalist logic of production, in which only "growth" counts.

**I genuinely think this is awesome.

***I grant that the committee-driven compromise that could easily come out of such a proposal would probably be something like a pilot program that effectively creates two tiers: "real" PMLA and "experimental" (perhaps all-online, perhaps less valuable toward t&p) PMLA. And that would never do.

No, seriously, how am I going to squish this down into a twenty-minute talk?

A Supposedly Fun Thing: Text-Mining and the Amusement/Knowledge System; or, the Epistemological Sentimentalists

If we could text-mine the internets of the last few days for the correlation between the words "n-gram" and "fun," I'm sure we'd get a nontrivial number. One of the most striking things about the reception of the Google Books Ngrams, largely in the form of the web tool, is the giddy delight with which people have announced how much fun it is. Exhibit A is the bit I quoted yesterday from Patricia Cohen at the New York Times:

The intended audience is scholarly, but a simple online tool allows anyone with a computer to plug in a string of up to five words and see a graph that charts the phrase’s use over time — a diversion that can quickly become as addictive as the habit-forming game Angry Birds.

But that's just one example--the fun of the Google Books Ngrams tool is almost universally noted. See, for instance, "Fun With Google's Ngram Viewer" (Mother Jones), "Fun with Google NGram Viewer" (WSJ), and "BRB, Can't Stop NGraming" (The Awl). And Dorothea Salo tweets,

What I like about the GBooks n-grams is seeing all kinds of people playing with it. Just playing. THAT, friends, is how one learns.

The prevalence of this language of play raises two questions.

1. What rhetorical work is this move (calling Google Books Ngrams a fun toy) doing?

2. What experiential dimension of Google Books Ngrams does this rhetorical move describe, and what does it tell us about the tool's epistemic significance?

Answering the first question feeds into answering the second. To call the Google Books Ngrams web tool (henceforth "GBN") a fun toy is to hedge one's bets, to express approval without necessarily venturing into the higher-stakes terrain of approving it as a research method. Any assessment of the tool's epistemic value is channeled through an expression of pleasure (or, as Patricia Cohen and The Awl's Choire Sicha rather interestingly suggest, compulsion). Play can of course be a form of learning, and very important--that's what Dorothea Salo's tweet indicates. But play is a good learning environment precisely because the stakes are low and mistakes can be made safely, as a comment by Bill Flesch suggests: "I played around with it for about half an hour. Now I'm bored." New toy, please! With respect to knowledge, the language of play is deeply ambivalent.

As I read it, the universal declaration of fun that has surrounded the release of GBN is as much about guilt as about pleasure. Those who are compulsively "ngraming," as Sicha so amusingly puts it, are often all too aware of GBN's limitations, which have been blogged extensively, all the way down to what Natalie Binder points out, in her much-retweeted post, has to underlie the whole operation: inevitably imperfect OCR.*

Why does the GBN web tool even exist? Not to advance knowledge, I don't think, or at least not directly, but rather because it's fun. Because it directs interest toward the more substantive element of the project, the downloadable data set that relatively few people are actually going to download.

There are huge problems with using GBN (and throughout I'm alluding to the web tool/toy that everybody is saying is so much fun) as any sort of meaningful index of culture, and everyone knows it. And yet.

I would argue that the universal declaration of fun is a form of confession: I am deriving epistemological satisfaction from this unsound tool, with its built-in Words for Snowism. It's a guilty pleasure, epistemic candy: the sensation of knowledge, lacking in any nutritional value.

But the guilt goes rather deeper than the simple tension between GBN's unreliability for actual research and the "gee whiz!" quality of the graphs: GBN is fun because it is so limited.

That great scholar of nineteenth-century culture, Walter Benjamin, described a mode of writing that he called "information."

Villemessant, the founder of Le Figaro, characterized the nature of information in a famous formulation. 'To my readers,' he used to say, 'an attic fire in the Latin Quarter [Paris] is more important than a revolution in Madrid.' This makes strikingly clear that what gets the readiest hearing is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but the information which supplies a handle for what is nearest. Intelligence that came from afar--whether over spatial distance (from foreign countries) or temporal (from tradition)--possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification. Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that it appear 'understandable in itself.' (147, emphasis added)

What GBN delivers is information in this sense. It is near at hand, easy to use, and puts out a nice visualization that appears "understandable in itself." It's easy to deliver, in that way, not unlike a pizza. It's no good to point out, as Mark Davies does, that the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) allows one to look at specific syntactic forms, or include related words, or track usages by the genre of the source. Such capacities only raise anxieties. (For example, what gets tagged as "nonfiction"? Where, for instance, do autobiographies go? I once, to my astonishment, saw The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in the nonfiction section of a book store--along with Three Lives! But I digress.)

As soon as we raise such questions, the graph stops being "understandable in itself," stops being information. Conversely, when you aren't given the choice to sort by genre, how genres are defined necessarily stops being a question. It's the very fact that the toy is a black box and a blunt instrument that makes it feel immediate and incontrovertible and, in that very satisfying way, obvious. We get the epistemic satisfaction of information, and the thing that gives it to us is precisely that information's lack of nuance.

Yesterday I used the word "cheap" to describe the kind of historical narratives GBN suggests. There is indeed a kind of economic dimension to the satisfaction that GBN delivers. Of Oscar Wilde's many quotable lines, I am reminded of this one:

The fact is that you were, and are I suppose still, a typical sentimentalist. For a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. (768)

Feeling, Wilde suggests, has to be earned.** Bracketing the question of whether this is a good description of sentimentalism, it's a good analogue for the epistemic candy of GBN. One receives the apparent solidity of research--the nice graph that summarizes and visualizes what might otherwise be years of labor in the making--without having to have actually done any research. This is only a cheap thrill, "fun," when it is actually cheap--that is, when we don't inquire into how the corpus was prepared, or what effects GBN's case-sensitivity is having on our results.

The analogy to sentimentalism is useful not only because it gives us a model for understanding the economy of feeling here, but also because it allows us to recognize that there is an element of feeling in the way that we encounter information. We are likely to find it ethically reprehensible when our emotions or what we believe we know are manipulated. And yet there are times when we want the cheap thrill. Most people I know will freely cop to liking a good emotionally manipulative movie or novel, whether a thriller or a romance or one of those movies where the dog dies. As the fun of ngrams demonstrates, we like a little intellectual manipulation too.

(I know, I know, it doesn't tell you anything conclusively, but...try Foucault versus Habermas!)

What does it mean, this liking it?

I mentioned Bill Brown's term, the "amusement/knowledge system," in my title above because it's another, perhaps more explicit way of describing the close interweaving of knowledge and fun at the end of the nineteenth century that so fascinated Benjamin (208). In my own work I have tried to make a case for taking seriously both the knowledge and the amusement in that system, notably in naturalist fiction, because it's often in such liminal places that the terms of what counts as knowledge are most at stake. Part of the reason experimental literature seems to be here to stay is that the amusement/knowledge system is, too.

The point is not to condemn fun as something that has no place in knowledge--far from it. Fun is central to how we vet knowledge--just think of how important it is that research be "interesting"! It is our highest (and also most common) praise.*** Indeed, play lies at the heart of our most cherished models of intellectual inquiry--a nonutilitarian curiosity to "see what happens." As I quoted Dorothea Salo at the beginning of this post: "THAT, friends, is how one learns."

So condemning fun is not at all on my agenda. Rather, I want to draw attention to the emotional content of the way we talk about knowledge, and to the ambivalence that intellectual "fun" signifies. Ours is an age of "news junkies" (again with the pleasure bordering on unpleasurable compulsion, à la the "addictive" ngrams) and "armchair policy wonks" and people who read voraciously, but only in the proverbial dubiously defined "nonfiction" category. Nate Silver and the Freakonomics dudes are minor celebrities. Lies, damned lies, and statistics are our idea of fun, as powerfully as a Victorian melodrama was ever considered fun. Which means we need to think much more about how fun operates, and why, and what that means for knowledge. And just as crucially: what knowledge means for pleasure.


*In fairness, Ben Schmidt argues that GBN's OCR is pretty accurate, given the state of the field, and also that "No one is in a position to be holier-than-thou about metadata. We all live in a sub-development of glass houses." But there's a big difference between "this is really good, for OCR" and "this degree of accuracy is good enough for supplying evidence for X kinds of claims."

**Taken out of context, Wilde appears here to be describing sentimentalism through an economic metaphor. In fact, it's rather the reverse, or at the very least something more confused than that: most of the surrounding text is taken up with Wilde chastising Douglas for his financial mooching.

***As Sianne Ngai points out, the "interesting," like the language of play, has a hedging quality, bridging epistemological and aesthetic domains.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." Trans. Harry Zohn. Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap-Harvard UP, 2002. Print.

Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1996. Print.

Ngai, Sianne. "Merely Interesting." Critical Inquiry 34.4 (Summer 2008): 777-817. Print.

Wilde, Oscar. "To Alfred Douglas." Jan.-Mar. 1897. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Eds. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-David. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Print.

Previously on text-mining:
Google Books Ngrams and the number of words for "snow"
Dec. 16, 2010
Dec. 14, 2010
Google's automatic writing and the gendering of birds

Google Books Ngrams and the number of words for "snow"

As I mentioned yesterday, Google has put out a big data set (downloadable) and a handy interface for tracking the incidence of words and phrases. As many have pointed out, one can do a lot more with the raw data set than with the handy, handy online tool, but it's that latter that the New York Times called

a diversion that can quickly become as addictive as the habit-forming game Angry Birds.

(I've never heard of Angry Birds, but that's the kind of thing I'm likely to be out of the loop on, so okay.)

I said yesterday that Google Books Ngrams was a lot more sophisticated than Googlefight, and it is. But I'm troubled by the model of cheap history that's presented in the NYT article--as if to suggest that if you want to do cultural studies now, all you need to do is Google (Books Ngram) it:

With a click you can see that “women,” in comparison with “men,” is rarely mentioned until the early 1970s, when feminism gained a foothold. The lines eventually cross paths about 1986.

You can also learn that Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe don’t get nearly as much attention in print as Jimmy Carter; compare the many more references in English than in Chinese to “Tiananmen Square” after 1989; or follow the ascent of “grilling” from the late 1990s until it outpaced “roasting” and “frying” in 2004.

“The goal is to give an 8-year-old the ability to browse cultural trends throughout history, as recorded in books,” said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard.

I will concede that newspaper articles are necessarily glib, but it's easy to see how the fallacy that this article promotes would be broadly accepted. The first quoted paragraph above correlates the incidence of words with known historical events; the second moves on to suggest the ngrams' predictive capacity. There's a narrative implicit in each statement of "just the facts," only the assumptions that go into them are effaced.

Let's look at the first of these reports: "With a click you can see that “women,” in comparison with “men,” is rarely mentioned until the early 1970s, when feminism gained a foothold."

The implicit narrative is that nobody even bothered to talk about women until second-wave feminism came along. In fact, if you go by the incidence of the words "men" and "women" in the Google Books Ngrams data set, sure, you might be tempted to really believe that the 1970s was the time "when feminism gained a foothold." I can imagine the suffragists who fought for and won the franchise that I as a woman can enjoy annually asking, "what are we, chopped liver?"

What distinguishes the feminist movements of the 1970s, for the purposes of this data set, is its renewed attention to language. The suffragists wanted a policy change: they wanted the vote (and the freedoms that the vote could give them). The second-wave feminists wanted policy changes too (still working on that wage gap, people!) but they also wanted a deeper change: they wanted to change the way we thought about women and--here's the kicker--spoke about women. The 1970s is when it became broadly recognized as problematic to treat "man" as a synonym for "person," and I suspect that a significant percentage of the uses of "men" were and remain the "universal" usage. That's a nuance that the online Ngrams tool can't give you ("with a click").

Likewise, if you got your understanding of history through Google Books Ngrams, you wouldn't expect to hear this from 1929:

Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my notebook. But I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed, to cope with all this. I should need claws of steel and beak of brass even to penetrate the husk. How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper, I asked myself, and in despair began running my eye up and down the long list of titles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex--woman, that is to say--also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. (27)

That's Virginia Woolf, of course, giving a fictionalized, subjective encounter with the British Library. Yes, it's a bit longer than a sentence, and you have to read it; you can't just click! But it gives you much more women's history than does the Google Books Ngrams example cited by the NYT.

Google Books Ngrams is a fun tool (as everyone keeps pointing out) and, if you download the data set, even a useful one. But it can only get you so far, and uncontextualized, it encourages assumptions that it does not announce. I mention the number of words for "snow" in my title above because it's a famous fallacy--the notion that Inuit has [insert high number here] words for snow, always with the implicit suggestion that having a lot of words for something means that something is extremely important to the culture. Language Log uses this as their go-to example of stupid assertions about language widely believed by the public; it's a cheap Whorfism, claiming broad cultural significance for something incidental. We have a widely accepted term for a magical being that flies by night and runs a clandestine cash-for-baby-teeth operation. That doesn't make it central to American culture. ("Mom, is the Tooth Fairy real?" "Yes! Check Google Books Ngrams if you don't believe me!")

There's a certain Words For Snowism in the online Google Books Ngrams tool, the suggestion that the more frequently a word is used, the more important it is in a collective unconscious of which the Google Books data set serves as a convenient index. This importance is not the same thing as significance, in the sense of significant digits or statistical significance; it's not the difference that makes a difference, but rather a psychologized importance--attachment, cathexis. Which is really kind of garbage.

The web interface is, as my friend Will says, a toy. For the serious scholar, there's much more to be done with ngrams, and one can be careful as well as lazy with the conclusions one draws. But the toy has a "boom! proven with statistics!" quality, a reality-effect that's enormously pleasurable, even, as Patricia Cohen writes for the NYT, "addictive." (That's the point of toys, isn't it?) That's why I'm inclined to agree with Jen Howard, who writes that her "skepticism is mostly directed at how people will use it and what kinds of conclusions they will jump to on dubious evidence." That sort of jumping is practically built into the ngrams tool.


Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Annot. and introd. Susan Gubar. 1929; Orlando: Harcourt, 2005. Print.

Previously on text-mining:
Dec. 16, 2010
Dec. 14, 2010
Google's automatic writing and the gendering of birds