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MOIRA_GRAPH
June 1, 2015
August 24, 2018
October 22, 2022
There's a review by Moira Weigel
in "The Nation", speaking in Moira Weigel's bio
awed tones of Raymond Williams explains she's working
"Keywords" on "Labors of Love"-- MOIRA_LOVE
how capitalism shaped
First edition: 1976 dating.
Revised edition: 1983
But was it destined?
The review also
discusses Moretti's PLOTTING_FATE
"Distant Reading",
suggesting that Williams
was a predecessor.
I didn't quite see the connection there,
though thinking about it a little further,
maybe I can see an association: Raymond
Williams and Franco Moretti both did things
you weren't supposed to do as a scholar--
they took approaches that might've been
dismissed as shallow overviews, but both did
their best to achieve some deeper
understandings with them.
Raymond Williams essentially wrote
a book about discoveries made
flipping through a dictionary.
And Franco Moretti...
HOW_SOFT_A_WHISPER
Moira Weigel on Raymond Williams:
"... Keywords is a compendium of micro-essays
... exploring 'the history of more than a
hundred words that are familiar and yet
confusing,' like 'Art; Bureaucracy; Culture;
Educated; Management; Masses; Nature;
Originality; Radical; Society; Welfare; Work.'"
"The concise histories that Keywords offered of
concepts like 'society'--discussing not just
their origins, but also how people had wielded
them to shape their times--appealed to readers
living through the political clashes of the
1980s, when Margaret Thatcher and the Tories
were setting out to prove that 'society' did not
exist."
"Williams makes it clear early on that if he
could pick only one term to investigate, it
would be 'culture.' The word comes from the Cultivating cultures
Latin verb colere and originally meant 'to of culture.
cultivate,' in the sense of tending
farmland. A 'noun of process,' it gradually Culling the
expanded to include human development, and by cults from the
the late 18th century, people commonly used coterie.
'culture' to mean how we cultivate
ourselves. Following the Industrial Clotting the
Revolution, however, the word took on a new clouds of
emphasis: It came to mean both an entire way enculturated
of life (as in 'folk' or 'Japanese' culture) clue-trains.
and a realm of aesthetic or intellectual
activity that stood apart from, or above, the No one beats me
everyday (basically, what people parody when on diving deep
they say 'culchah')." into the shallows.
Moira Weigel goes on to describe Williams as
the advocate of studies of popular culture,
as opposed to the older style of elitest
gatekeeping characterized by T.S. Elliot.
She segues into "digital humanities"-- "the
book resembles a digital-humanities project I would suggest that the word
before its time", and talks about Morretti. of the era is not "digital"
but "community". (Possibly:
"digital community".)
(Oct 22, 2022)
An odd thought:
I wonder if you could study this
evolution of meanings and infer
general rules for how language
evolves.
And:
Moretti deploys his graphs of
character relationships and
timelines of popularity...
Is there a
Could you make projections of web of destiny?
how such things are likely to
evolve in the future? (A destined web.)
Moira Weigel on Moretti:
"It is hard to picture what truly data-driven literary studies
would look like. Pharmacologists use a 'sandbox' model to
develop new medications: identifying them by observing
clusters of incidental effects from existing substances. But
while search functions and other algorithms can be used to
test intelligent hypotheses from scholars trained in close
reading and well versed in their periods, it's not clear that
there is yet any model for reverse-engineering interpretations
based on literary data."
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