Ted Underwood
Biographic Data
| ID | 291074 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ted Underwood |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ted |
| FAMILY NAME | Underwood |
| SIGNATURE | UNDERWOOD T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8960-1846 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Who decides what is read on Goodreads? Uncovering sponsorship and its implications for scholarly research
Attracted by the promise of a broader and more egalitarian sample of readers than published book reviews provide, researchers are increasingly scraping social reviewing platforms like Goodreads for data about readers’ behavior. Yet, treating online book reviews as direct proxies for readers and books can be problematic, as they are socially and technically constructed artifacts shaped by platform dynamics, whether between developers and users, or…
Disentangling semantic and prosodic features of English poetry
The distinction between genre and form is still contested in literary studies. While scholars associated with the New Formalism are criticized for perceiving everything as a form, digital humanists tend to argue that everything is a genre. In this research, we employed machine learning models to classify 36,635 English poems in the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections into twenty-seven categories, focusing on their semantic features (lexicons) …
Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture
Many aspects of behavior are guided by dispositions that are relatively durable once formed. Political opinions and phonology, for instance, change largely through cohort succession. But evidence for cohort effects has been scarce in artistic and intellectual history; researchers in those fields more commonly explain change as an immediate response to recent innovations and events. We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,83…
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…
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…
NovelTM Datasets for English-Language Fiction, 1700-2009
This report accompanies a collection of 210,305 volumes, predicted to be fiction, that researchers are encouraged to borrow for their own work. We divide the collection into seven subsets with different emphases (for instance, one where books written by men and women are represented equally, and one composed of only the most prominent and widely-held books). Comparing the pictures produced by these different subsets allows us to assess the resili…
Critical Response II . The Theoretical Divide Driving Debates about Computation
Distant Horizons
The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction
This essay explores the changing significance of gender in fiction, asking especially whether its prominence in characterization has varied from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. We have reached twoconclusions, which may seem in tension with each other. The first is that gen-der divisions between characters have become less sharply marked over the last 170 years
Distant Reading and Recent Intellectual History
Literary scholars' conversations about distant reading have spent too much time pitting it against close reading, and not enough time understanding connections to other disciplines. Distant reading is better understood as part of a methodological shift that has permitted humanists and social scientists to build stronger interdisciplinary connections.
Genre Theory and Historicism
Genre is a word whose time has come - and gone - and might now, perhaps, be coming back again. Debates about particular literary kinds have been com-mon in literary criticism since Aristotle's Poetics, but they acquired a new intensity and reflexivity in the third quarter of the twentieth century, as structuralists and poststructuralists struggled to redefine the concept of genre itself
The Life Cycles of Genres
The concept of genre is as old as literary theory itself, but centuries of debate haven't produced much consensus on the topic. Part of the reason is that genre looks like a different thing at different points in the life of a text
The literary uses of high-dimensional space
Debates over "Big Data" shed more heat than light in the humanities, because the term ascribes new importance to statistical methods without explaining how those methods have changed. What we badly need instead is a conversation about the substantive innovations that have made statistical modeling useful for disciplines where, in the past, it truly wasn't. These innovations are partly technical, but more fundamentally expressed in what Leo Breima…
Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago
Quantitative methods have been central to the humanities since scholars began relying on full-text search to map archives. But the intellectual implications of search technology are rendered opaque by humanists' habit of considering algorithms as arbitrary tools. To reflect more philosophically, and creatively, on the hermeneutic options available to us, humanists may need to converse with disciplines that understand algorithms as principled epis…
The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies
We use quantitative methods to analyze a collection of 21,367 scholarly articles in literary studies from 1889-2013. Our approach reveals aspects of our disciplinary history that have been occluded by existing histories' emphasis on generational and methodological conflict. We demonstrate gradual, unnoted shifts in the themes and vocabularies of scholarship-including the long rise of new subjects (like violence); we show the surprising novelty of…
The Denaturalization of Economic Thought
Book Review| January 01 2009 The Denaturalization of Economic Thought Margaret Schabas. The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 2005). Pp. 231. $40. ISBN 0-226-73569-9 Ted Underwood Ted Underwood Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eighteenth-Century Life (2009) 33 (1): 71–73. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-2008-028 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Si…
The Work of the Sun
At the end of the Eighteenth century, British writers began to celebrate work in a strangely indirect way. Instead of describing diligence as an attribute of character, poets and novelists increasingl
Energy and the Autonomy of Middle-Class Work
U ntil the eighteenth century, energy was a learned term, common only in texts of metaphysics and rhetoric. After 1750, it rapidly became a buzzword. The frequency of energy and energetic in the written record tripled between 1750 and 1800. 1 (The frequency of the French cognate, énergie , quadrupled over the same period. 2 ) The word began to appear in novels and in personal letters; in the last quarter of the century, energy-talk was so much in…
Stories of Parallel Lives and the Status Anxieties of Contemporary Historicism
Several novels and films from the 1980s and 1990s hinge on a parallel between sets of lives that unfold in different historical periods. This article argues that the premise of parallel lives is a way of grappling with a threat to the cultural and social status conferred by historicism. It compares this narrative anxiety to apprehensions about the fate of history and memory that have recently been expressed by social theorists, including Sven Bir…
The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies
We use quantitative methods to analyze a collection of 21,367 scholarly articles in literary studies from 1889-2013. Our approach reveals aspects of our disciplinary history that have been occluded by existing histories' emphasis on generational and methodological conflict. We demonstrate gradual, unnoted shifts in the themes and vocabularies of scholarship-including the long rise of new subjects (like violence); we show the surprising novelty of…
Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago
Quantitative methods have been central to the humanities since scholars began relying on full-text search to map archives. But the intellectual implications of search technology are rendered opaque by humanists' habit of considering algorithms as arbitrary tools. To reflect more philosophically, and creatively, on the hermeneutic options available to us, humanists may need to converse with disciplines that understand algorithms as principled epis…
The Life Cycles of Genres
The concept of genre is as old as literary theory itself, but centuries of debate haven't produced much consensus on the topic. Part of the reason is that genre looks like a different thing at different points in the life of a text
Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture
Many aspects of behavior are guided by dispositions that are relatively durable once formed. Political opinions and phonology, for instance, change largely through cohort succession. But evidence for cohort effects has been scarce in artistic and intellectual history; researchers in those fields more commonly explain change as an immediate response to recent innovations and events. We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,83…
Disentangling semantic and prosodic features of English poetry
The distinction between genre and form is still contested in literary studies. While scholars associated with the New Formalism are criticized for perceiving everything as a form, digital humanists tend to argue that everything is a genre. In this research, we employed machine learning models to classify 36,635 English poems in the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections into twenty-seven categories, focusing on their semantic features (lexicons) …
Critical Response II . The Theoretical Divide Driving Debates about Computation
The literary uses of high-dimensional space
Debates over "Big Data" shed more heat than light in the humanities, because the term ascribes new importance to statistical methods without explaining how those methods have changed. What we badly need instead is a conversation about the substantive innovations that have made statistical modeling useful for disciplines where, in the past, it truly wasn't. These innovations are partly technical, but more fundamentally expressed in what Leo Breima…
Stories of Parallel Lives and the Status Anxieties of Contemporary Historicism
Several novels and films from the 1980s and 1990s hinge on a parallel between sets of lives that unfold in different historical periods. This article argues that the premise of parallel lives is a way of grappling with a threat to the cultural and social status conferred by historicism. It compares this narrative anxiety to apprehensions about the fate of history and memory that have recently been expressed by social theorists, including Sven Bir…
The Work of the Sun
At the end of the Eighteenth century, British writers began to celebrate work in a strangely indirect way. Instead of describing diligence as an attribute of character, poets and novelists increasingl
Energy and the Autonomy of Middle-Class Work
U ntil the eighteenth century, energy was a learned term, common only in texts of metaphysics and rhetoric. After 1750, it rapidly became a buzzword. The frequency of energy and energetic in the written record tripled between 1750 and 1800. 1 (The frequency of the French cognate, énergie , quadrupled over the same period. 2 ) The word began to appear in novels and in personal letters; in the last quarter of the century, energy-talk was so much in…
The Denaturalization of Economic Thought
Book Review| January 01 2009 The Denaturalization of Economic Thought Margaret Schabas. The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 2005). Pp. 231. $40. ISBN 0-226-73569-9 Ted Underwood Ted Underwood Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eighteenth-Century Life (2009) 33 (1): 71–73. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-2008-028 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Si…
Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago
Quantitative methods have been central to the humanities since scholars began relying on full-text search to map archives. But the intellectual implications of search technology are rendered opaque by humanists' habit of considering algorithms as arbitrary tools. To reflect more philosophically, and creatively, on the hermeneutic options available to us, humanists may need to converse with disciplines that understand algorithms as principled epis…
The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies
We use quantitative methods to analyze a collection of 21,367 scholarly articles in literary studies from 1889-2013. Our approach reveals aspects of our disciplinary history that have been occluded by existing histories' emphasis on generational and methodological conflict. We demonstrate gradual, unnoted shifts in the themes and vocabularies of scholarship-including the long rise of new subjects (like violence); we show the surprising novelty of…
The literary uses of high-dimensional space
Debates over "Big Data" shed more heat than light in the humanities, because the term ascribes new importance to statistical methods without explaining how those methods have changed. What we badly need instead is a conversation about the substantive innovations that have made statistical modeling useful for disciplines where, in the past, it truly wasn't. These innovations are partly technical, but more fundamentally expressed in what Leo Breima…
Distant Reading and Recent Intellectual History
Literary scholars' conversations about distant reading have spent too much time pitting it against close reading, and not enough time understanding connections to other disciplines. Distant reading is better understood as part of a methodological shift that has permitted humanists and social scientists to build stronger interdisciplinary connections.
Genre Theory and Historicism
Genre is a word whose time has come - and gone - and might now, perhaps, be coming back again. Debates about particular literary kinds have been com-mon in literary criticism since Aristotle's Poetics, but they acquired a new intensity and reflexivity in the third quarter of the twentieth century, as structuralists and poststructuralists struggled to redefine the concept of genre itself
The Life Cycles of Genres
The concept of genre is as old as literary theory itself, but centuries of debate haven't produced much consensus on the topic. Part of the reason is that genre looks like a different thing at different points in the life of a text
The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction
This essay explores the changing significance of gender in fiction, asking especially whether its prominence in characterization has varied from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. We have reached twoconclusions, which may seem in tension with each other. The first is that gen-der divisions between characters have become less sharply marked over the last 170 years
Distant Horizons
NovelTM Datasets for English-Language Fiction, 1700-2009
This report accompanies a collection of 210,305 volumes, predicted to be fiction, that researchers are encouraged to borrow for their own work. We divide the collection into seven subsets with different emphases (for instance, one where books written by men and women are represented equally, and one composed of only the most prominent and widely-held books). Comparing the pictures produced by these different subsets allows us to assess the resili…
Critical Response II . The Theoretical Divide Driving Debates about Computation
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…
Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture
Many aspects of behavior are guided by dispositions that are relatively durable once formed. Political opinions and phonology, for instance, change largely through cohort succession. But evidence for cohort effects has been scarce in artistic and intellectual history; researchers in those fields more commonly explain change as an immediate response to recent innovations and events. We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,83…
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…
Who decides what is read on Goodreads? Uncovering sponsorship and its implications for scholarly research
Attracted by the promise of a broader and more egalitarian sample of readers than published book reviews provide, researchers are increasingly scraping social reviewing platforms like Goodreads for data about readers’ behavior. Yet, treating online book reviews as direct proxies for readers and books can be problematic, as they are socially and technically constructed artifacts shaped by platform dynamics, whether between developers and users, or…
Disentangling semantic and prosodic features of English poetry
The distinction between genre and form is still contested in literary studies. While scholars associated with the New Formalism are criticized for perceiving everything as a form, digital humanists tend to argue that everything is a genre. In this research, we employed machine learning models to classify 36,635 English poems in the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections into twenty-seven categories, focusing on their semantic features (lexicons) …
Philosophy (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · History (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Art (8 works) · Literature (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Digital Humanities and Scholarship (7 works) · Epistemology (7 works)