Anthony Trollope’s preternatural power

Simon Winchester in today’s New York Times Book Review:

Traveling in China back in the early 1990s, I was waiting for my westbound train to take on water at a lonely halt in the Taklamakan Desert when a young Chinese woman tapped me on the shoulder, asked if I spoke English and, further, if I knew anything of Anthony Trollope. I was quite taken aback. Trollope here? A million miles from anywhere? I mumbled an incredulous, “Yes, I know a bit” — whereupon, in a brisk and businesslike manner, she declared that the train would remain at the oasis for the next, let me see, 27 minutes, and in that time would I kindly answer as many of her questions as possible about plot and character development in “The Eustace Diamonds”?

Ever since that encounter, I’ve been fully convinced of China’s perpetual and preternatural power to astonish, amaze and delight.

It doesn’t actually seem that preternatural to me that a young, presumably educated woman read a novel and liked it.  What he should have been convinced of is Anthony Trollope’s perpetual and preternatural power to astonish, amaze and delight people separated from him by vast spans of culture and time.  “The Eustace Diamonds” is ace.  Probably “He Knew He Was Right” or “Can You Forgive Her?” (my own first Trollope) are better places to start.  Free Gutenbergs of both here.  Was any other Victorian novelist great enough to have the Pet Shop Boys name a song after one of their books?  No.  None other was so great.

There is no such Albanian as Jiri Kajane

The Guardian covers a literary hoax, in which several prominent literary magazines published short fiction by “Jiri Kajane,” purportedly a middle-aged Albanian emigre, actually a couple of twenty-something American MFA students.  One of them was a classmate of mine in the fiction program at Johns Hopkins.  Among the students he made no secret of the fact that he was writing stories set in Albania, putting the name “Jiri Kajane” on them, and getting them published in literary magazines.  At the time it seemed like some kind of grandiose participatory performance art and I never thought of spilling the beans.  But every so often I wondered, will this ever get revealed, or will Jiri Kajane become an accepted minor figure in the history of Albanian literature?  Now I know.

Humanities Hackathon

Had a great time today talking graph theory with a roomful of students and faculty in the humanities at the Humanities Hackathon.  Here’s a (big .ppt file) link to my slides.  One popular visualization was this graph of baby boys’ names from 2011, where two names are adjacent if their popularity profile across 12 representative states is very similar.  (For example, names similar to “Malachi” on this measure include “Ashton” and “Kaden,” while names similar to “Patrick” include “Thomas,” “John,” “Sean,” and “Ryan.”)

 

The visualization is by the open-source graph-viz tool gephi.

I came home only to encounter this breathless post from the Science blog about a claim that you can use network invariants (e.g. clustering coefficient, degree distribution, correlation of degree between adjacent nodes) to distinguish factually grounded narratives like the Iliad from entirely fictional ones like Harry Potter.  The paper itself is not so convincing.  For instance, its argument on “assortativity,” the property that high-degree nodes tend to be adjacent to one another, goes something like this:

Real-life social networks tend to be assortative, in the sense that the number of friends I have is positively correlated with the number of friends my friends have.

The social network they write down for the Iliad isn’t assortative, so they remove all the interactions classified as “hostile,” and then it is.

The social network for Beowulf isn’t assortative, so they remove all the interactions classified as “hostile,” and then it still isn’t, so they take out Beowulf himself, and then it is, but just barely.

Conclusion: The social networks of Beowulf and the Iliad are assortative, just like real social networks.

Digital humanities can be better than this!