Journal of Cultural Analytics
Dados do Periódico
| Tipo | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Editora | CA: Journal of Cultural Analytics |
| ISSN | 2371-4549 |
| Scopus | 21101046167 |
| Wikidata | Q96713201 |
| OpenAlex | S4210188927 |
| MAG | 4210188927 |
| Site | http://culturalanalytics.org |
| Total de publicações | 209 |
| Período coberto | 2016 - 2026 |
| País | CA |
| Idioma | EN |
| Acesso | Open Access • OA Diamante |
| Indexação | Scopus |
| Citada por | 8 |
| Fator de impacto | 0.459 |
| SJR | 0.373 (Q1) |
| SNIP | 1.822 |
| CiteScore | 1.8 |
| Índice h | 2 |
| Participação feminina na autoria | 48.6% |
The Journal of Cultural Analytics focuses on computational and quantitative approaches to cultural phenomena. While its methodology differs from traditional ethnography, its subject matter of "culture" aligns with cultural studies, making it a cognate venue with regular intersection
History · Literature and Literary Theory · Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) · Computer Science (miscellaneous) · Advanced Text Analysis Techniques · Artificial Intelligence in Games · Authorship Attribution and Profiling · Cinema and Media Studies · Computational and Text Analysis Methods
Princeton Geniza Project datasets
MajinBook: An Open Catalogue of Digitally Mediated World Literature
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This data paper introduces MajinBook, an open catalogue designed to facilitate the use of shadow libraries—such as Library Genesis and Z-Library—for computational social science and cultural analytics. By linking metadata from these vast, crowd-sourced archives with structured bibliographic data from Goodreads, we create a high-precision corpus of over 539,000 reference…
A Digital Collection for a Coahuiltecan Ethnohistory
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.During the XVIII century, the Coahuiltecan language was spoken by various Indigenous nations who lived a nomadic lifestyle in the territory of nowadays South Texas, United States, and the Mexican States of Coahuila and Nuevo Leon. A comprehensive linguistic corpus of the Coahuiltecan language, along with the names of the nations of its speakers, has been obtained from a…
Modeling Oral Narrative in Central Veracruz, Mexico: A Digital Itinerant Community-Based Library/Museum
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Oral narratives represent a vital, yet often undervalued, source for understanding how the different communities interpret, inhabit, and remember the world. Despite their epistemic richness, they have long been marginalized within academic canons. This article addresses the challenge of integrating oral knowledge into rigorous processes of documentation, analysis, and p…
Mapping the Intangible: Challenges and Innovations in the Spatial Analysis of Purulia Chhau
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.The growing integration of digital tools and methodologies in cultural heritage studies has transformed how we engage with and interpret intangible practices across diverse contexts. This study examines the spatiotemporal performance patterns of various Purulia Chhau troupes, a vibrant folk dance-drama tradition from West Bengal, India, over a year. The novelty of this …
Interpretive Digital Humanities: Social Worlds of Orality, Visual Communication and Cultural Practice
Searching for the Dutch Corner in the Republic of Letters: Network Science and Wittgenstein’s Family Resemblance
This article has a twofold contribution. First, it offers a new way to consider communities that are conceptually and analytically difficult to define. This method has been based on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblance’, applied here through a novel quantitative process, using an online knowledge base – Wikidata – and bespoke visualisations to identify communities in large epistolary datasets. A bipartite analysis b…
Shakespeare and Company Project Data Sets, Version 2.0
The Shakespeare and Company Project data sets provide a detailed portrait of Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris. This article outlines the research, data curation, and development that led to a major update of the data sets. Version 2.0 refines and augments the data sets included in Version 1.2, and adds two new datasets, focused on the authors of the books that circulated in the lending library…
Bibliographic metadata as relational data: A cross-disciplinary methodological reflection
In this paper, I reflect on the growing cross-disciplinary convergence around the use of bibliographic metadata as empirical material in digital/computational history and quantitative economic history. I outline the main challenges in preprocessing library catalog metadata, drawing on examples from both fields. A pilot case on the academic collection of the Old University of Louvain demonstrates key steps in data transformation and preparation, w…
Fine-Tuning the Historian's Macroscope: Data Reuse and Medieval Korean Biographical Records in Neo4j
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This article explores the development and application of a historian’s macroscope, a computational framework that enables multiscalar exploration of medieval Korean biographical records using Neo4j. While digitization has greatly expanded access to historical sources, existing methodologies struggle to integrate large, heterogeneous datasets while maintaining interpreti…
Tug-of-War of Emotion: Measuring and Modeling Sentiment Cycles in Chinese-Language Pop Song Lyrics, 1967-2023
Scholars of popular music often assume that trends in the sentiment of pop song lyrics (becoming more positive or negative over time) “mirror” those in listeners’ preferences or the ethos of societies. For example, the detected monotone downward trend in the sentiment of English-language pop lyrics is typically interpreted as “reflecting” the deteriorating emotional and mental state in listener populations and/or the increasing demand for more ne…
Seeing Formalism or Formal Viewing: Computational Formalism for the Analysis of Visual Media Forms and Contexts
By Lauren Tilton, Justin Wigard. In this article, the authors revisit published work and explore forthcoming research to demonstrate computational formalist studies of history, culture, and context in visual media (particularly television, photography, and comics)
Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse
This paper examines the formal and aesthetic patterns of AI-generated poems through a series of computational experiments. Through analyses of rhyme and rhythm, it reveals how large language models (LLMs) exhibit a stubborn, formal stuckness in their outputs. The paper demonstrates that LLMs often ossify poetic forms by producing formally conservative texts that adhere more rigidly to traditional poetic conventions than even the most formally str…
Pranks and the Viral Canon: On Top-Creator Content from YouTube to TikTok
Since the early 2000s, digital pranks—or filmed practical jokes—have earned a reputation for platform-based popularity. But how prominent are such pranks amongst other “viral” genres? And what might they reveal, more generally, about viral video as a cultural form? In this essay, I address these broad questions from a specific perspective: I consider the digital prank in the context of two datasets of video content by top-ranked English-language …
Beyond Computational Formalism or, Architecture Matters
Despite frequently avowed commitments to formalist methodologies, computational literary studies (CLS) has insufficiently accounted for the importance of the formal architectures of the computational models it employs—particularly deep learning neural networks. Arguing against the tendency to treat neural networks with an abstract gloss of their operation or to focus attention on the outputs, this article posits that architecture is not merely a …
Beyond Plot: How Sentiment Analysis Reshapes Our Understanding of Narrative Structure
Sentiment analysis, particularly with the advent of large language models, is reshaping our understanding of narrative. Emotional arcs in both fictional and non-fictional narratives surface latent structures that challenge traditional notions of plot and character. One reason is that feature extraction correlates with passages often selected for close reading, suggesting the role of emotion in passage selection has been undertheorized. Case studi…
Computation and Form, Reconsidered
Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, critics have continually reconsidered the compatibility of computation and the humanities. Often, questions of “form” have played key roles in these conversations. In the 1940s, for example, critics asked whether word-counting might capture “formal units” of poetry like style. By the 2010s, scholars debated with new fervor whether computational methods could—or should—be used to track aesthetic…
Parler Games: A Narrative Framework Analysis of Parler Conspiracy Theories and the January 6th Insurrection
Parler, a prominent right-leaning "echo platform," became a forum in late 2020 for Trump supporters convinced the 2020 election was fraudulent as they abandoned or were banned from Twitter. This study suggests that a narrative analytical approach to the discussions on Parler in the period from the 2020 presidential election up to the violence at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 can provide some insight into the relationship between storytelling a…
Geotropes: Situating Postcolonial Bestsellers in the Global Literary Marketplace
Conceptions of the literature of the Global South, and of India in particular, have been powerfully shaped by the work of a small number of well-known authors writing in English. The possible distortions resulting from this limited canon have garnered significant scholarly attention in the past two decades, which has typically focused on how works produced by these writers are shaped by their own positionality as well as the exigencies of caterin…
The Eclectic Reader
Eclecticism has been among the most central concerns in the sociology of cultural consumption for 30 years, but hardly any research has been done on the eclecticism of readers. We have been using data from Goodreads to address this blind spot. Our research enables us to describe some general patterns of breadth vs narrowness in the reading habits of highly active Goodreads users, which largely resemble the socially hierarchized schema of omnivore…
Online Reviews as Communal Formations. A Corpus Linguistic Approach
Within the framework of our research we intend to show how online reviews could be seen not only as texts, but as digital practices and as part of “communal formations”. In order to justify our claim, we have collected extensive data from different literary review resources as well as reviews of museums and exhibitions, and general discussions of cultural objects from different reviewing platforms. Implementing traditional methods of corpus lingu…
The “Mapping German fiction in translation” dataset: Data collection, scope, and data quality
The “Mapping German fiction in translation” dataset consists of 35,972 translated titles of fiction originally published in German between 1980-2020 by 6,457 authors in 86 languages. It represents the first freely available dataset of bibliographic translation data extracted from the German National Library in 2021 and 2023. The dataset is part of a project that aims at mapping the geographic and linguistic traces of German fiction by means of tr…
Quantifying the Presence of Ancient Greek and Latin Classics in Early Modern Britain
This paper explores the reception of classical works in Early Modern Britain during the hand press era, between the 1470s and 1790s. It investigates canon formation, knowledge transmission, and the integration of digital archives in quantitative book history. The study quantitatively maps changing perceptions of the classical canon across time, offering a panoramic view of 'shifting canons'. The analysis is based on three data archives: the Engli…
Racial and Ethnic Representation in Literature Taught in US High Schools
We quantify the representation, or presence, of characters of color in English Language Arts (ELA) instruction in the United States to better understand possible racial/ethnic emphases and gaps in literary curricula. We contribute two datasets: the first consists of books listed in widely-adopted Advanced Placement (AP) Literature & Composition exams, and the second is a set of books taught by teachers surveyed from schools with substantial Black…
Approaching a National Film History through Data. Network Analysis in German Film History
The present paper is an attempt at importing network analysis as a method and applying it to a field that has hitherto been examined in different ways: the study of national cinema. The approach was motivated by the perceived conundrum in the existing studies of German cinema that filmhistorical and political history usually do not match. The aim is to open up another perspective on the problem of periodization by looking at the data of film prod…
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
Understanding Gender and Character Agency in the 19th Century Novel
The relationship between character identity and character action is an established topic of literary study. In Morphology of the Folktale, Vladimir Propp argues against the separation of "who acts" from "the question of the actions themselves," instead advocating an approach that studies characters according to their functions
Scotland's Poetics of Space: An Experiment in Geospatial Semantics
This paper reports on a collaborative project that develops new applications ofspatial text analysis. We offer a methodology to identify and evaluate correlations between semantic and geographic distance in a printed corpus
Genre, Computation, and the Varieties of Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction
Is “literary fiction” a useful genre label in the post-World War II United States? In some sense, the answer is obviously yes; there are sections marked “literary fiction” on Amazon, in bookstores, and on Goodreads, all of which contain many postwar and contemporary titles. Much of what is taught in contemporary fiction classes also falls under the heading of literary fiction, even if that label isn’t alwaysused explicitly
Other people's data: Humanities edition
Every project that uses numbers to make sense of literature seems to teach us again that in digital analysis we create more data than we can ever fully use and therefore understand. And yet, with each new project we produce more. In the Community Resource Guide to Digital Humanities Curation, Julia Flanders and Trevor Muñoz define research data as the "raw and abstracted material created as part of research processes and which may be used again a…
Scotland's Poetics of Space: An Experiment in Geospatial Semantics
This paper reports on a collaborative project that develops new applications ofspatial text analysis. We offer a methodology to identify and evaluate correlations between semantic and geographic distance in a printed corpus
The Tell-Tale Hat: Surfacing the Uncertainty in Folklore Classification
Classification is a vexing problem in folkloristics. Although broad genre classifications such as “ballad”, “folktale”, “legend”, “proverb”, and “riddle” are well established and widely accepted, these formal classifications are coarse and dolittle more than provide a first level sort on materials for collections that can easily include tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of records
From Reproducible to Productive
The very idea of a "canonical data set" implies a whole organization of knowledge: first, the data are durably available—a quarter-century on—thanks among other things to the institutional continuity of the GSS as an important large-scale data-collection enterprise of American social science; second, the data remain meaningful, their validity underwritten by the methods of survey research; third, the disciplinary norms of sociology allow for the …
The Migrant Letter Digitised: Visualising Metadata
Within the digital humanities, social network analysis - using digital technologiesto examine the relationship between people, places and things - has explored awide range of digital communication formats, from emails to tweets. This hasbeen made possible because of the large amount of online digital data and hasspawned many new techniques specifically aimed at analysing very large datasets,often termed Big Data
Topic Modeling, Epistemology, and the English and German Novel
According to Rita Felski, context is overrated. Even in the sophisticated variants of contextualization typical of the New Historicism, she explains, scholars’ obsession with historical context as the ultimate source of textual meaning disregards the capacity of literature to resonate across time and space
Towards a Poetics of Strangeness: Experiments in Classifying Language of Technological Novelty
The trajectory of science fiction since World War II has been defined by its rela-tionship with technoscientific imaginaries. In the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s, writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein dreamed of the robots and
Topic Modeling the Hàn diăn Ancient Classics (汉典古籍)
There is a small but growing literature on large-scale statistical modeling of Chinese language texts. Ouyang analyzed a corpus of over 40,000 ancient documents downloaded from multiple sources. This was used to plot the temporal distributions of word frequencies and geographic distributions of authors. Huang and Yu modeled the SongCi poetry corpus, first converting it to tonally marked pinyin to conserve poetically important pronunciation inform…
Linked Reading: Digital Historicism and Early Modern Discourses of Race around Shakespeare’s Othello
As Renaissance conceptions of otherness have become a locus of critical study,no work has been more central for making the case about dominant ideologiesof race than Shakespeare’s Othello. Ania Loomba has suggested that ”more than any other play of the time, Othello allows us to see that skin colour, religion,and location were often contradictorily yoked together within ideologies of ‘race,’and that all these attributes were animated by notions o…
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
The Identity Issue
This special issue of Cultural Analyticstackles the urgent question of how so-cial identities can be addressed through computational methods. In particular, it probes the extent to which large datasets can be used to elucidate the kindsof questions that humanities scholars want to ask about historical and represen-tational processes that structure social relations and positions
Crossing Over: Gendered Reading Formations at the Muncie Public Library, 1891-1902
Readers are never merely passive recipients of textual messages. One of themost powerful insights of reader-response theory in the 1970s and 1980s is that the meaning of a text never resides entirely within the artifact itself. Commentators from Carlo Ginzberg (“aggressive originality”), to Jauss (“horizon of ex-pectations”), to Fish (“interpretive communities”), and Radway (“Reading is notEating”) have long-since established that readers are cre…
Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets
Literary readings provoke strong feelings, which feed intense critical de-bates. And while recorded literary readings have long been available for study, few scholars have applied to them the empirical methods that the digitalhumanities and interdisciplinary sound studies now offer
Self-Repetition and East Asian Literary Modernity, 1900-1930
Literary readings provoke strong feelings, which feed intense critical de-bates. And while recorded literary readings have long been available for study, few scholars have applied to them the empirical methods that the digitalhumanities and interdisciplinary sound studies now offer
Nation, Ethnicity, and the Geography of British Fiction, 1880-1940
Among the most pressing problems in modernist literary studies are those re-lated to Britain’s engagement with the wider world under empire and to its ownrapidly evolving urban spaces in the years before the Second World War. In both cases, the literary-geographic imagination—or unconscious—of the periodbetween 1880 and 1940 can help to shed light on how texts by British and British-aligned writers of the era understood these issues and how they …
Stable Random Projection: Lightweight, General-Purpose Dimensionality Reduction for Digitized Libraries
Digital libraries today distribute their contents in a way that limits the sort ofwork that can be done with them. Modern libraries are so large-often containingmillions of books or articles-that the technical resources needed to work withthem can be immense
Image Analytics and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Newspaper
The nineteenth-century British periodical press took textual production to a scalethat, for many commentators then and now, summoned the sublime. It was a“flood” which was “too vast to be dealt with as a whole,” in the words of theBritish Quarterly Reviewin 1859
Measuring Modernist Novelty
One may as well begin with two overly-cited quotations about novelty. Thefirst: “On or about December, 1910, human character changed.” And, morepredictably: “Make It New!” That these two statements about change and innovation have been so frequentlycited reveals a contradiction in modernist studies: novelty is commonplace,both for modernist writers and for literary critics
Historiography’s Two Voices: Data Infrastructure and History at Scale in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB)
On its release in 2004, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was called “the greatest book ever” and “a more enthralling read than all the novels ever entered for the Booker Prize put together.” The tabloid The Daily Mail, where these giddy pronouncements appeared, is not known for understatement, but more cautious academic researchers have long held the ODNB in similarly high esteem. Stefan Collini, writing in the London Review of Books, …
Detecting Footnotes in 32 million pages of Ecco
In “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant responded to a big questionburied in a little footnote. But you wouldn’t know it, because contemporaryeditions of Kant’s famous essay no longer reproduce the parenthetical directivethat Kant’s original essay printed right under the essay’s title in the Decemberissue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784: “S. Decemb. 1783. S. 516.” (S…
Critical Search: A Procedure for Guided Reading in Large-Scale Textual Corpora
Q: What happens when the good, old-fashioned virtues of Liberal Arts education, e.g. "Critical Thinking," enter the age of big data?\nA: We teach "Critical Search," a model process for approaching big data research. Critical Search models a way of engaging humanities question, textuality, secondary literature, data, and tools. It is suitable to both the statistician who wishes to make meaning from the past as well as the traditional humanist who …
Archival Circulation on the Web: The Vine-Tweets Dataset
Visual Style in Two Network Era Sitcoms
Extensive scholarship in media studies has established how formal elements of moving images—such as camera angles, sound, and framing—reflect, establish, and challenge cultural norms. Prior computational analyses attempting to ana- lyze these elements have primarily relied on summarizing relatively low-level fea- tures
Foreword to the Special Issue “A Shared Task for the Digital Humanities: Annotating Narrative Levels”
This volume is the first of two, and it documents activities that we have been conducting in the past years. They are best described as “organizing shared tasks with/in/for the digital humanities” and have evolved significantly since we started