Scale as Deformance: The Particulars of 'Big Data' in the Humanities Research

While there have been many advocates in the digital humanities for methods and projects that shuttle between scales, debates about "big data," "distant reading," or "macroanalysis" continue to dominate both scholarly and popular conversations about the field. Taking the Viral Texts Project at Northeastern University as a central example and drawing from discussions across a wide disciplinary spectrum, Professor Ryan Cordell will grapple with the meaning of scale in humanities research and challenge the popular metaphor of the macroscope, which requires a fractal notion of textual systems. 

In contrast, Cordell will posit scale as a tool of critical "deformance" that teaches while distorting the textual system, lending outsized importance to a given scholar's object at the expense of those features outside our purview. Cordell will outline a framework for projects that vacillate among distinct vantage points-close, middle, and distant-in order to apprehend textual artifacts within their cultural fields.

All welcome and there will be drinks and discussion after the talk. Please note that registration is required.

This seminar will be followed by a masterclass on Thursday 19th May, on Literary and Historical Network Analysis.

Professor Cordell's visit to UCL is funded by the UCL Big Data Institute

Speaker

Ryan Cordell is an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University and core founding faculty member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. His scholarship focuses on convergences among literary, periodical, and religious culture in antebellum American mass media. Prof. Cordell collaborates with colleagues in English, history, and computer science on the NEH-, Mellon-, and ACLS-funded Viral Texts project, which uses robust data mining tools to discover reprinted content across large-scale archives of nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. These "viral texts" help us to trace lines of influence among antebellum writers and editors, and to construct a model of viral textuality in the period.

Cordell is currently a Mellon Fellow of Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia and holds an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship during the 2015-2016 academic year. He also serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of centerNet's journal, DHCommons; and writes about technology in higher education for the group blog ProfHacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education.