This project is funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, from 2018 to 2022.
Project Overview
This project aims to progress a central insight of cultural criticism into the “postprint” era: that meaning is not carried by texts but produced in situated interactions between readers, texts and contexts. Conceptually, the project works at the intersection of human reading and computer modeling to resist their common opposition or conflation, and explore how digital forms and methods might progress critical agendas of the humanities, and vice versa. This theoretical investigation occurs alongside – it enables and is enabled by – a data-rich one. Using massively expanded digital evidence of reception of Australian literature (in academic journals, newspapers and social media book reviewing platforms such as GoodReads and LibraryThing), the project explores reading and modeling in terms of emerging and intersecting assemblages of human and nonhuman actors.
Publications
Under contract 2024. Literary Apparatuses: Reading-Writing Practices. Stanford University Press.
Forthcoming 2023. “Doing (Computational) Literary Studies.” New Literary History Special Issue: Computation and Critical Theory.
Forthcoming 2023. “What’s the Matter with Computational Literary Studies?” Critical Inquiry (Summer).
Selected Presentations
2022. Keynote. “Too big to small.” Small Data is Beautiful Symposium. University of Melbourne. 18-19 February.
2022. Invited Presentation. “Making not Mediating: Some Thoughts on Modelling in Computational Literary Studies.” DHLunch@GS. University of Texas, Austin. 4 April.
2020. Invited Presentation. “Computational Modeling: From Data Representation to Performative Materiality.” Animating Text Seminar Series. University of Newcastle and Institute of English Studies, University of London. 26 November.
2020. Keynote. “What’s the Matter With Computational Literary Studies? An Inquiry into Materiality and Meaning.” Interface Workshop. Freie University, Berlin. 4–6 November.
2020. Conference Paper. “Data Beyond Representation: From Computational Modelling to Performative Materiality.” MLA Convention, Seattle, 10 January. [here]
Katherine Bode 