data analysis – High Theory

In this episode of High Theory, Justin Joque talks with Júlia Irion Martins about Probability. This conversation is part of our High Theory in STEM series, which tackles topics in science, technology, engineering, and medicine from a highly theoretical perspective. If you want to learn more about the philosophical, technical, and economic implications of probability, check out Justin’s new book, Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and the Logic of Capitalism (Verso, 2022).

Justin Joque is a visualization librarian at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Justin’s research focuses on philosophy, media, and technology and he is also the author of Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

In this episode Kim talks with Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu about distant reading.

Ama Bemma provides her Global Poetics Project as an awesome example of distant reading. She also references Franco Moretti’s book Distant Reading (Verso, 2013) and Ted Underwood’s essay “A Genealogy of Distant Reading” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11 no. 2 (2017). Take a look at her short blog post on big data at the Network for Digital Humanities in Africa, for more of her insights on distant reading.

In the longer version of our conversation Ama Bemma gave the African literary blog Brittle Paper as another example of contemporary digital humanities work. She also mentions James Yeku’s symposium on African digital storytelling.

Towards the end we discuss Alan Liu’s commentary on cultural criticism in the digital humanities, and the philosophical amusements of “What is Digital Humanities?” Make sure when you visit that last page that you reload the page!

Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu is a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow (2021-2022) and a Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, who researches post-1960s global literary networks, focusing on poetry and poets from around the world. You can read her essay on “Poetry from Afar: Distant Reading, Global Poetics, and the Digital Humanities” in Modernism and Modernity.

Image by Saronik Bosu

Music used in promotional material: “These many stairs” by Tendon Levey

Tagged : algorithmic literary criticism / computational formalism / computational literary studies / cultural analytics / data analysis / digital humanities / macroanalysis / quantitative literary studies