Richard Jean So
Biographic Data
| ID | 286412 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Jean So |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard Jean |
| FAMILY NAME | So |
| SIGNATURE | SO R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0009-0002-6442-055X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The social AI author
This article examines generative AI models as sociocultural actors, focusing on how they reproduce and constrain notions of authorship and identity within the contemporary U.S. literary field. Through a simulation of 101 “AI authors” modeled on real-world counterparts, we analyze how language models articulate literary distinction across race, gender, and publishing contexts. Our findings show that generative outputs are dominated by a reductive …
The Humanistic Case for AI Optimism
Covid, Crisis, and the Search for Story in the Platform Age
Wattpad is a popular online writing website in which individuals write, upload, and comment on original stories. In 2020, the platform had more than a hundred million registered users. In this article, we use a mixture of close and distant reading methods to study how lay authors wrote about the COVID-19 global pandemic during its first year. We examine some of the formal and generic norms these authors used to narrativize this event; how such no…
"BLM Insurgent Discourse, White Structures of Feeling and the Fate of the 2020 "Racial Awakening
Working with Twitter data, this paper offers new findings on the #BlackLivesMatter movement and "racial awakening" of summer 2020. Framing methods to address this important moment, this paper contends that cultural studies and critical race studies can be enriched through an engagement with new computational approaches. We analyze how white and racial minority voices talked about race and track their fraught contestation for leadership of racial …
Culture, Theory, Data
The introduction to a special issue of New Literary History titled "Culture, Theory, Data," which explores the consequences of computation for cultural theory—and vice-versa. The introduction begins by explaining how we came to a historical juncture where "culture" and "data" seem to be opposed terms. Then it offers some reasons for believing that opposition is beginning to fade, including the emergence of "a new theoretical lingua franca" that d…
Introduction
This essay introduces the articles found in this special joint issue of Post-45 and the Journal of Cultural Analytics, "Post-45 by the Numbers." It foregrounds the affordances of computational methods for the study of contemporary culture and literature, and offers brief summaries of each of the eight essays that follow in this special issue
Can We Map Culture
Images that convert culture into physical space have a durable appeal, and numbers make it possible to literalize a spatial representation of culture by measuring the “distances” between cultural artifacts. But do cultural relationships really behave like physical distance? There are good reasons to think the analogy is imperfect, and a number of alternative geometries have been proposed—extending, in a few cases, to a systematic distinction betw…
Redlining Culture
The canon of postwar American fiction has changed over the past few decades to include far more writers of color. It would appear that we are making progress-recovering marginalized voices and including those who were for far too long ignored. However, is this celebratory narrative borne out in the data?Richard Jean So draws on big data, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publi…
Race, Writing, and Computation
This article seeks to bridge two scholarly fields often seen as incommensurable:cultural analytics (also known as “computational criticism”) and critical racestudies. It does so by discovering generative points of contact between two sets of methods that are also typically viewed as antithetical: data science and critique.Cultural analytics is an emerging field wherein humanist scholars leverage the in-creasing availability of large digital corpo…
The Invention of the Global MFA
Journal Article The Invention of the Global MFA: Taiwanese Writers at Iowa, 1964–1980 Get access Richard Jean So Richard Jean So Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Literary History, Volume 29, Issue 3, Fall 2017, Pages 499–520, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajx020 Published: 25 July 2017
Transpacific Community
In the turbulent years after World War I, a transpacific community of American and Chinese writers and artists emerged to forge new ideas regarding aesthetics, democracy, internationalism, and the political possibilities of art. Breaking with preconceived notions of an "exotic" East, the Americans found in China and in the works of Chinese intellectuals inspiration for leftist and civil rights movements. Chinese writers and intellectuals looked t…
Literary Pattern Recognition
Network Science and Literary History
This paper introduces a method for applying network analysis to the sociological study of literary history. Focusing on “little magazines” and poetry journals in the U.S., Japan, and China, the authors utilize bibliographic records to construct weighted, bipartite graphs of poets and journals linked by publication. Through visual and quantitative analysis of the resulting networks, the authors aim to augment traditional hermeneutics with empirica…
Network Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism
Literary historians have long been interested in sociological approaches to literature. The field of modernism, a major aesthetic movement that flourished between 1915-40 primarily in the United States, England, and Europe, but the rest of the world as well, has been seen as a particularly compelling site to explore the sociological underpinnings of art. It is in this movement that many of our ideas of the “autonomy of art” and the “genius” of th…
Literary Information Warfare
So's essay reconstructs a literary genealogy for the emergence of "information warfare" in the early Cold War period (the 1950s). Specifically, it argues that this form of warfare-which So dubs "literary information warfare"-took shape first and most keenly within the US state's encounter with Communist China. The essay narrates this story by exploring the United States Information Agency's (USIA) recruitment of a major Chinese author, Eileen Cha…
Collaboration and Translation
Collaboration and Translation: Lin Yutang and the Archive of Asian American Literature Richard Jean So (bio) In spring of 1947, Richard Walsh, editor in chief of the John Day Publishing House, wrote a letter to his star author, Lin Yutang, the famous Chinese diasporic writer and novelist. Walsh had invited Lin to relocate to the United States from China several years earlier. The radical 1930s in China had been unkind to Lin: as a self-described …
Fictions of Natural Democracy
This essay offers a new reading of the American author Pearl Buck, focusing on her cultural concept of "natural democracy." It does so by critically reconstructing and examining this concept through three linked contexts: 1930s China, the novel The Good Earth, and the 1943 Chinese Exclusion Acts Repeal hearings. The essay argues that natural democracy enabled the emergence of a U.S.-China, trans-Pacific cultural sphere that helped to facilitate t…
Literary Pattern Recognition
Network Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism
Literary historians have long been interested in sociological approaches to literature. The field of modernism, a major aesthetic movement that flourished between 1915-40 primarily in the United States, England, and Europe, but the rest of the world as well, has been seen as a particularly compelling site to explore the sociological underpinnings of art. It is in this movement that many of our ideas of the “autonomy of art” and the “genius” of th…
Literary Information Warfare
So's essay reconstructs a literary genealogy for the emergence of "information warfare" in the early Cold War period (the 1950s). Specifically, it argues that this form of warfare-which So dubs "literary information warfare"-took shape first and most keenly within the US state's encounter with Communist China. The essay narrates this story by exploring the United States Information Agency's (USIA) recruitment of a major Chinese author, Eileen Cha…
Fictions of Natural Democracy
This essay offers a new reading of the American author Pearl Buck, focusing on her cultural concept of "natural democracy." It does so by critically reconstructing and examining this concept through three linked contexts: 1930s China, the novel The Good Earth, and the 1943 Chinese Exclusion Acts Repeal hearings. The essay argues that natural democracy enabled the emergence of a U.S.-China, trans-Pacific cultural sphere that helped to facilitate t…
Collaboration and Translation
Collaboration and Translation: Lin Yutang and the Archive of Asian American Literature Richard Jean So (bio) In spring of 1947, Richard Walsh, editor in chief of the John Day Publishing House, wrote a letter to his star author, Lin Yutang, the famous Chinese diasporic writer and novelist. Walsh had invited Lin to relocate to the United States from China several years earlier. The radical 1930s in China had been unkind to Lin: as a self-described …
Fictions of Natural Democracy
This essay offers a new reading of the American author Pearl Buck, focusing on her cultural concept of "natural democracy." It does so by critically reconstructing and examining this concept through three linked contexts: 1930s China, the novel The Good Earth, and the 1943 Chinese Exclusion Acts Repeal hearings. The essay argues that natural democracy enabled the emergence of a U.S.-China, trans-Pacific cultural sphere that helped to facilitate t…
Network Science and Literary History
This paper introduces a method for applying network analysis to the sociological study of literary history. Focusing on “little magazines” and poetry journals in the U.S., Japan, and China, the authors utilize bibliographic records to construct weighted, bipartite graphs of poets and journals linked by publication. Through visual and quantitative analysis of the resulting networks, the authors aim to augment traditional hermeneutics with empirica…
Network Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism
Literary historians have long been interested in sociological approaches to literature. The field of modernism, a major aesthetic movement that flourished between 1915-40 primarily in the United States, England, and Europe, but the rest of the world as well, has been seen as a particularly compelling site to explore the sociological underpinnings of art. It is in this movement that many of our ideas of the “autonomy of art” and the “genius” of th…
Literary Information Warfare
So's essay reconstructs a literary genealogy for the emergence of "information warfare" in the early Cold War period (the 1950s). Specifically, it argues that this form of warfare-which So dubs "literary information warfare"-took shape first and most keenly within the US state's encounter with Communist China. The essay narrates this story by exploring the United States Information Agency's (USIA) recruitment of a major Chinese author, Eileen Cha…
Transpacific Community
In the turbulent years after World War I, a transpacific community of American and Chinese writers and artists emerged to forge new ideas regarding aesthetics, democracy, internationalism, and the political possibilities of art. Breaking with preconceived notions of an "exotic" East, the Americans found in China and in the works of Chinese intellectuals inspiration for leftist and civil rights movements. Chinese writers and intellectuals looked t…
Literary Pattern Recognition
The Invention of the Global MFA
Journal Article The Invention of the Global MFA: Taiwanese Writers at Iowa, 1964–1980 Get access Richard Jean So Richard Jean So Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Literary History, Volume 29, Issue 3, Fall 2017, Pages 499–520, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajx020 Published: 25 July 2017
Race, Writing, and Computation
This article seeks to bridge two scholarly fields often seen as incommensurable:cultural analytics (also known as “computational criticism”) and critical racestudies. It does so by discovering generative points of contact between two sets of methods that are also typically viewed as antithetical: data science and critique.Cultural analytics is an emerging field wherein humanist scholars leverage the in-creasing availability of large digital corpo…
Introduction
This essay introduces the articles found in this special joint issue of Post-45 and the Journal of Cultural Analytics, "Post-45 by the Numbers." It foregrounds the affordances of computational methods for the study of contemporary culture and literature, and offers brief summaries of each of the eight essays that follow in this special issue
Can We Map Culture
Images that convert culture into physical space have a durable appeal, and numbers make it possible to literalize a spatial representation of culture by measuring the “distances” between cultural artifacts. But do cultural relationships really behave like physical distance? There are good reasons to think the analogy is imperfect, and a number of alternative geometries have been proposed—extending, in a few cases, to a systematic distinction betw…
Redlining Culture
The canon of postwar American fiction has changed over the past few decades to include far more writers of color. It would appear that we are making progress-recovering marginalized voices and including those who were for far too long ignored. However, is this celebratory narrative borne out in the data?Richard Jean So draws on big data, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publi…
"BLM Insurgent Discourse, White Structures of Feeling and the Fate of the 2020 "Racial Awakening
Working with Twitter data, this paper offers new findings on the #BlackLivesMatter movement and "racial awakening" of summer 2020. Framing methods to address this important moment, this paper contends that cultural studies and critical race studies can be enriched through an engagement with new computational approaches. We analyze how white and racial minority voices talked about race and track their fraught contestation for leadership of racial …
Culture, Theory, Data
The introduction to a special issue of New Literary History titled "Culture, Theory, Data," which explores the consequences of computation for cultural theory—and vice-versa. The introduction begins by explaining how we came to a historical juncture where "culture" and "data" seem to be opposed terms. Then it offers some reasons for believing that opposition is beginning to fade, including the emergence of "a new theoretical lingua franca" that d…
Covid, Crisis, and the Search for Story in the Platform Age
Wattpad is a popular online writing website in which individuals write, upload, and comment on original stories. In 2020, the platform had more than a hundred million registered users. In this article, we use a mixture of close and distant reading methods to study how lay authors wrote about the COVID-19 global pandemic during its first year. We examine some of the formal and generic norms these authors used to narrativize this event; how such no…
The Humanistic Case for AI Optimism
The social AI author
This article examines generative AI models as sociocultural actors, focusing on how they reproduce and constrain notions of authorship and identity within the contemporary U.S. literary field. Through a simulation of 101 “AI authors” modeled on real-world counterparts, we analyze how language models articulate literary distinction across race, gender, and publishing contexts. Our findings show that generative outputs are dominated by a reductive …
History (12 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Art history (5 works) · China (5 works)