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or, The yack of the hack of the yack

How we should go about mining the digital archive of the history of scholarship for theoretical resources? Let’s talk about text-mining journals, quantitatively analyzing metadata about scholarship, and living with closed access as theorists. And perhaps we can work on a dataset or two—I’ll bring some example data and laughably primitive visualizations!

The explanation

One of theory’s major tasks is to describe how scholarship is done—and then to prescribe how it should be done. Often the description leads to the prescription: theory as scholarship about scholarship. Well, yes. It is characteristic of a whole family of genres that belong to theory, from De la grammatologie to Orientalism to Ahmad’s In Theory, Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy to Sheldon Pollock theorizing a "Political Philology" in a memorial essay about the scholarship of D.D. Kosambi.

Meanwhile, over in digital-land, one of the richest digital archives we have is the archive of scholarship itself. But we are used to using these archives for search, not as objects of analysis in themselves. That is what I’d like to explore in this session. What does the MLA Bibliography tell us—in the aggregate? What theoretical possibilities can we open up by mining the extraordinary archive represented by JSTOR’s Data for Research service?

I’d be able to talk about two examples of datasets I’ve done a little work on—one from the MLA Bibliography and one from JSTOR’s archive of PMLA. Please feel free to bring your own datasets, or leads, or inspirations, or problems, or concerns.

Over on my Rutgers website I’ve placed a longer version of this proposal with a teaser on those example datasets. And a link to Andy Abbott’s hilarious hit piece on DH and keyword search, via an analysis of concordances.

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So… I know that if you went by the activity on this site, all summer long it looked like THATCamp Theory was going to be, er, purely theoretical. But secretly a bunch of us have been THATCamping like the wind, as it were. THATCamp Theory will be held October 13-14, 2012 in Murray Hall at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). It will include workshops led by Shannon Mattern, Jean Bauer, Patrick Murray-John, Wendy Chun, and Andrew Lison about which I am exceedingly stoked.

What else will it include? Well, that’s up to you.

I hope to post more in the coming days and weeks, but for now:

• Thanks to support from Microsoft Research, Rutgers University, and Bard College, we have a little bit of funding for travel. We hope to turn this into a lot of funding, because we know there are people from all over who have things to say about theorizing digital humanities and digitizing theory. Details to come.
• If you think your organization would be willing to donate travel funds, please drop me a line: natalia.cecire@yale.edu.
• Registration will open no later than September 1.
• WE WANT YOU! Start thinking about what you’d like to contribute, what you’d like to learn.