The article suggests that the best examples of textual work in the computational humanities are best understood as motivated by aesthetic concerns with the constraints placed on literature by computation’s cultural hegemony. To draw these concerns out, I adopt a middle-distant depth of field, examining the strange epistemology and unexpected aesthetic dimension of numerical culture’s encounters with literature. The middle-distant forms of reading I examine register problematically as literary scholarship not because they lack rigor or evidence but because their unacknowledged (...) object of study is the infrastructure of academic knowledge production. Work in the computational humanities is approaching a point at which the scale of analyzed data and data analysis washes out readings, the algorithms are achieving opaque complexity, and the analytical systems are producing purposive outputs. These problems cannot be addressed without attending to the aesthetics of data-driven cultural encounters, specifically the questions of how we produce readings/viewings and how they change our perceptions and characterize the interesting, critical theorization on method and meaning that make the best work in the computational humanities legitimately humanistic. I contribute a working example: a recommendation system for passages within the Shakespearean dramatic corpus, built using a large bibliographical dataset from JSTOR, a counting/ranking algorithm used at large scale. The system returns passages as intertexts for the passage a reader has selected. I explain how and why this system provides meaningful intertextual connections within the Shakespearean dramatic corpus by tracing the legible structural effects of disciplinary knowledge formation on the shape of this dataset. I close by suggesting how the computational and more traditional methods in the humanities might begin to stop debating past one another. (shrink)

Undergirding China’s Belt and Road Initiative’s lofty promise of global connectivity are existing connections between the PRC’s implementation of planetary-scale observation systems for environmental sustainability and the recognizably nefarious policies of localized, colonial surveillance of Turkic minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). My article examines how the recently alleged genocide in XUAR becomes the afflicted topos where both the rhetoric and practices of monitoring differently complex systems come together. Such complex connections require a recursive analysis, one which further (...) distinguishes between recursion as an actual technique used in remote sensing and algorithmic processes and recursion as a heuristic in discourses about these computational processes and their effects on controlled populations and territories. This article, following recent interest in the intersections of geopolitics, computational design, digital capitalism and colonialism, argues that the Chinese government’s multipronged investments in environmental sciences-related sensing and imaging technologies do not simply help track its own citizens and foreign populations but also how these groups are increasingly monitored by them. I examine how the Digital Belt and Road’s Science Plan frames the environment, including sovereign territories, peoples, and natural resources as data assets. The rest of my discussion turns away from state-sponsored Earth sciences to examine Anglophone media and human rights groups’ use of satellite imageries and databases to evidence the state’s construction of internment facilities and other surveillance mechanisms in XUAR. Alleged algorithms of oppression enclose the XUAR as a black box of the police state, but digital infographic interfaces like the Xinjiang Data Project, which attempts to expose the PRC’s relegation of Uyghurs to biometric and surveillance data, only furthers a recursive datafication of XUAR. (shrink)

This body of work is motivated by an apparent contradiction between, on the one hand, Darwin’s testimony in his autobiographical text about a supposed perceptual colour blindness before the aesthetic magnificence of natural landscapes, and, on the other hand, the last paragraph of On the Origin of Species, where he claims to perceive the forms of nature as beautiful and wonderful. My aim is to delve into the essence of the Darwinian perception of beauty in the context of the Weberian (...) concept of “disenchantment of the world”, assumed as a possible conceptual axis that enables the unravelling of the core of this contrast of perceptions. In acknowledging the theory of evolution as one of the most prominent scientific theories likely to have contributed to disenchantment, a number of questions arise: Is disenchantment compatible with aesthetic experience and sensibility before natural beauty? Was it Darwin’s disenchanted conception of the world that led him to believe he was colour blind? To answer these questions, a computer-assisted semantic analysis of lexical frequency and variability, most especially focused on aesthetic-emotional and religious or spiritual adverbs and adjectives, has been undertaken across the six editions of The Origin. The semantic analysis demonstrates that, although disenchanted, Darwin’s descriptions of, mainly, the adaptational excellence of living beings, reflect an aesthetically enriched perception of nature. It is concluded that Darwin’s perceptual colour blindness, then, might be based on a confusion rooted in the equation of equality between aesthetic sensibility in nature and the perception of its beauty as part of the vestigia Dei. (shrink)

Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game. Guy Debord In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.Mary Poppins1This article, formerly known to us as “Citi...

The debate about computational literary studies (CLS) is stuck. Forceful arguments are repeatedly made as to why literary studies must now—or could never—involve quantification, statistics, and algorithms (not least in this journal) with little sense of either side convincing the other of their case. Surveying this debate over the past decade, I propose that what seems a complete divergence of opinion obscures a fundamental agreement: that computation is separate from literary phenomena. For the field’s critics, this distinction makes CLS an (...) oxymoron; for its proponents, both ways of knowing can contribute to literary studies, and there is critical potential in working across the divide. Yet the perception of a divide remains, and it prevents either effective critiques of reductive uses of computation (in literary studies and beyond) or productive engagements with computation’s constitutive effects (including for literary textuality and subjectivity). In charting this divide as it characterizes and limits apparently very different arguments, I connect claims about technology and subjectivity made in critiques and defenses of CLS to the separation of matter and meaning commonly referred to as Cartesian dualism. With both sides maintaining this arrangement, the debate about CLS is sealed off from technocultural inquiries in multiple fields (including literary studies) and from much of what matters in and as contemporary literary phenomena. The performative approaches to scientific and literary materiality I use to elucidate problems with the existing debate also help to characterize, explain the need for, and make legible where it already exists, a different—performative—CLS. Attuned to the coconstitution of computational methods and objects, with each other, and with literary subjectivities and textualities, this CLS builds on and extends existing critical paradigms to enable literary studies in the postprint era. (shrink)